THE GOSPELS
AND THE CRITIC
THE GOSPELS
AND THE CRITIC
BY
A. W. F. BLUNT, D.D.
Bishop of Bradford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD
1936
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.G. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
5^55"
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
1559660
PREFACE
AT the Bournemouth Church Congress in 1935, I read a
JL\ paper on 'Christ in the Gospels 9 , which I have now en-
larged into the present book. It is intended for those who,
without being specialist students of the Bible, are yet interested
enough in the study to wish to know what is the present
position in Gospel criticism. I am greatly indebted to Dr.
Vincent Taylor and Dr. F. L. Cross for some helpful
suggestions in the course of its composition.
A.B.
CONTENTS
I. IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM . i
II. THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM AND THE
FOURTH GOSPEL 20
III. THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL . 28
IV. THE ESCHATOLOGISTS . . . .41
V. THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM . 54
VI. SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH: 'IS CRITICISM
WORTH WHILE?' 69
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
nnms book is intended for those Christians, whether
JL clergy or laity, who are not specialists in Biblical
study. Their degrees of ignorance of the subject vary very
greatly. But the habit of open discussion is part of the
price of civilization; and in our own time the activities of
the Press are so ubiquitous that there can be very few,
even of 'simple Christians', who are not in some way or
another brought up at times against the reverberations of
the critical movement. They may be uninterested in or
impatient with it, it may cause them to worry or doubt;
but they cannot pass through life as if there were no such
thing or as if it did not seriously matter to anybody.
The dislike for novelty is a very persistent prejudice;
and, in questions where religion is concerned, that which
is mere conservatism loves to pose as orthodoxy. There
is therefore no cause for surprise in the fact that nowadays,
after over a hundred years of Biblical study in its modern
form, there are still many who distrust the higher criticism
of the Bible, and consider the higher critic to be either an
enemy of the Faith or at least an insidiously dangerous
species of Modernist. In certain circles it is still possible
to win a cheap reputation for controversial smartness by
speaking with a sneer of 'the so-called higher critics', a
phrase which is as intelligent as it would be to speak of a
'so-called* pharmaceutical chemist or a 'so-called' civil
engineer.
Let us therefore at the outset be clear as to the meaning
B
2 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
of the terms which we use. 'Criticism* in relation to the
Bible means nothing else but the application of scientific
study to the books, in the same way as it may be applied
to any other piece of literature. The 'lower criticism*
concerns itself with the text. The 'higher criticism' studies
such questions as the authorship, sources, date, and
character of the books. A priori suspicion of such study is
mere ignorant obscurantism. The conclusions reached
and the theories suggested are liable to and in fact demand
exhaustive examination. Scholars can make mistakes ; they
have to revise or renounce many an hypothesis. But that
the Biblical books should be exempt from an investigation
designed to appraise their claim to authenticity or to
authority (two very different things) is a demand which
no intelligent lover of truth will make or allow.
The Process of Criticism
Higher criticism of the Bible first set itself to inquire
into the authorship and date of the books. For instance,
was the Pentateuch, as the tides in the A.V. claimed, a set
of five books by Moses or not? Were the chapters 40-66
of the Book of Isaiah written by that prophet in the late
eighth or early seventh century B.C., or were they by
writers of the exilic or post-exilic period? Was the Book
of Daniel exilic or later? Was the traditional ascription
of the Fourth Gospel to John the Son of Zebedee correct,
or must some other account be given of its production?
Was the First Gospel written by S. Matthew, and who
was the John who wrote the Book of Revelation?
It must be realized that such questions as these did not
cast any reflection on the authority or the inspiration of
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 3
the books themselves, but only on their authenticity. The
titles of the books are not part of the books. It was not
the writer of the Pentateuch who called its five books the
Books of Moses, nor was it Isaiah who called the sixty-six
chapters of his book the Book of Isaiah. Ancient books
had no titles; these were supplied by later scholars and
were themselves a first essay of higher criticism. It is true
that the first verse of Isaiah claims Isaianic authorship;
but can it be established that this claim covers the whole
of the chapters that follow? Did Isaiah collect the chap-
ters himself, or was the roll of 'Isaiah' an agglomeration
of separate prophecies, which Jewish scholars united to
form one volume, so that the ascription of large parts of
it was the work not of Isaiah but of Jewish criticism? The
Book of Deuteronomy contains a great many speeches
attributed to Moses; but was this attribution to be taken
literally, or was it only a literary convention whereby that
was ascribed to Moses which was considered a proper
derivative of his teaching? The. traditional ascriptions of
the Gospels were due to the higher critics of the early
Church. In John 2i 2 * the Gospel is said to be the work
of 'the beloved disciple'; but it is not stated who gives this
attestation nor is the name of the beloved disciple re-
corded. The presumption of infallible inspiration cannot
be legitimately applied to the claims to authorship made
for at least most of the books, for most of them make no
such claims on their own behalf.
But criticism could not stop at this point. It was
natural that from the subject of authenticity it should go
on to that of authority. It could not fail to be remarked
that, for instance, the books of the Pentateuch were by no
4 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
means homogeneous, that the books of Joshua and Judges
were not historically reconcilable with one another, that
Chronicles in several respects gave a different account of
Hebrew history from that to be found in Kings, that there
were plain divergences in the four Gospels, or that the
Book of Acts could not easily be made to tally at all
points with S. Paul's Epistles. How could these differences
be explained? And if a choice had to be made between
them, what canons of historical science might be applied
to direct the selection?
This was purely a question of historical scholarship. It
could only be answered by bringing into consideration all
the relevant data, whether internal or external. No re-
ligious or philosophical presuppositions had the right to
any say in the matter. And, in relation to the Old Testa-
ment, scholarship did on the whole keep itself free from
such clouding of the issues. No doubt critical hypotheses
have had to be continually revised, as fresh data were
discovered, or fresh light on old data was brought to bear.
But it is worth while to emphasize that the process of Old
Testament criticism has usually been one of scholarly
self-correction. Radical critics and conservative critics
have equally been critics; they have applied scientific
methods, and their dispute has been not as to the methods
but as to the relative importance of the several data used
in applying these methods. Suggestions, answers, and
rejoinders have all been on the plane of science; and out
of the process of argument it has emerged that the alterna-
tives before us are those of accepting either an evolution-
ary or a static view of Old Testament history and religion.
The issue may be thus explained:
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 5
The Static View of the Old Testament
According to the 'static' view, which is the traditional
view of Biblical conservatism, the Pentateuch as it stands
is Mosaic. Moses therefore gave the Hebrew tribes a
complete ceremonial and social and religious code, antici-
patory of the conditions of a settled community. Thus,
there was always an Aaronic High-priesthood, with a
subordinate priesthood monopolized by the tribe of Levi.
From Mosaic times there was a complete cultus suitable
to a pure Jahvism, thought out to the smallest detail of
tassels and breeches; there was an elaborate Tabernacle,
which was the centre of worship, wherever it was, whether
at Shiloh or Bethel or Jerusalem, and which from Solo-
mon's time was incorporated in the Temple; there was a
complete system of daily, weekly, and annual sacrifice.
If so, then the history of the Hebrews in Canaan was
one of frequent and deliberate apostasies; the people
forsook the centralized worship in order to sacrifice at
high places to idolatrous baalim and ashtaroth; and the
golden bulls of Jeroboam I were the cause of a continuous
apostasy of the northern kingdom. But these were overt
rebellions; and whenever reforms came, the complete
system only needed reviving, with the Tabernacle or
Temple as the only place of sacrifice, the High Priest and
Levites as the only ministers of worship, and the three
annual visits to Jerusalem of every true worshipper.
The criticisms which Biblical science can make on this
picture are obvious. To begin with, it is a deadening
picture of a process that starts with a frozen perfection,
which thaws at times only to freeze again. It is not a
6 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
natural picture of religious growth. Again, it makes the
canonical prophets excrescences on, or at least subordinate
to, the story of the process. The patriarchal and wilder-
ness period is treated as more important than the pro-
phetic period. The prophets are the heralds of reversion,
not of advance. Moreover, when we set the Pentateuch
side by side with the historical books, the history becomes
purely unintelligible. Thus, even if we raise no objection,
on the score of probability, to the possession of an elabo-
rate Tabernacle by nomad tribes wandering in the desert,
we cannot so easily get over the fact that no High Priest
seems ever to be heard of or to hold a position of any
importance till the time of Haggai; that the prophetic
hatred of any form of sacrifice is almost unqualified, and
in Amos 5 25 , Jeremiah y 22 it is definitely denied that a
sacrificial system had been ordained by Jahveh in the
wilderness period; and that the evidence for the use of
high places and of a ritual suitable to them is wholly in-
consistent with the theory that the idea of a centralized
worship dated from Moses. We find everybody using
them (cf. Judges if, 18 30 ; i Sam. 9 11 - 14 - 19 , io 8 , I9 16 ;
I Kings I4 23 ' 24 ) and others than Levites offering sacri-
fices. No king interferes with them till Hezekiah (2 Kings
i8 4 ), nor really abolishes them till Josiah. No prophet
denounces them till Hosea (4 12 ~ 14 ). Worship at the high
places, so far from being an apostasy, was orthodoxy, at
least until Hezekiah's time. No hint that it is wrong is
found in the historical books except in the recurrent
formula of the writer of the Books of Kings. The static
picture of tradition is only obtained by taking the Penta-
teuch as history, and 'rigging* the historic and propheti-
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 7
cal books to fit it; and the resultant picture is dull and
lifeless.
The Evolutionary View of the Old Testament
Let us now, by contrast, set out the story as recon-
structed for us by that school of Old Testament criticism
in which the greatest name is that of Wellhausen; it is the
picture which in its main lines, whatever uncertainty there
may be as to details, is accepted by all reputable scholars as
a reasonable synthesis of the available data. According to
it, the Mosaic cultus was simple and primitive. Its main
apparatus consisted of the Tent of Meeting, the Ark, the
Urim and Thummim, and an improvised Altar; there was
no specific law of Jahvistic worship and nothing but a
primitive sacrificial practice. But, when they entered
Canaan, the Hebrews adopted the Canaanite method of
ritual and sacrifice and used the Canaanite high places.
At every local sanctuary sacrificial worship was practised;
there was no centralized system; and though Solomon
made the Temple at Jerusalem the royal chapel, the
worship at the high places still continued in general use,
and nobody thought it wrong. Later, the monarchy intro-
duced the worship of foreign gods; and the protest of
Elijah and Elisha was directed against this with some suc-
cess. But the use of the high places still continued until,
after the prophets of the eighth century had preached a
more elevated idea of Jahveh's character, the first attempt
to purge the national worship was made by Hezekiah.
This failed, and in the seventh century a full code of
Jahvistic worship was compiled in the spirit of eighth-
century prophecy, with all sacrificial worship centred at
8 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
Jerusalem. This, the Deuteronomic Code, was the in-
spiration of Josiah's reform. But the early death of that
king and the closely following exile gave this law no chance
of being established. During the Exile, however, under
the influence of Ezekiel and others, and after the Return,
the elaboration of Jahvistic cultus continued, through the
antiquarian efforts of priests and the zeal of the prophetic
party, until the Priestly Code was compiled, mainly by the
efforts of the Babylonian Jews, and this code, brought to
Judea by Ezra, was incorporated with the previously
existing documents to form the completed Pentateuch.
Here we have a coherent story. It rests mainly on the
analysis of the Pentateuchal documents into J (the Jahvis-
tic document), E (the Elohistic document), 1 H (the Law
of Holiness, Lev. 17-26, which is perhaps contemporary
with or slightly older than Ezekiel), D (the Deuteronomic
Code), and P (the Priestly Code). This analysis by no
means depends merely on the variety of names given to
God, but is based also on real affinities and real diver-
gences of tone and outlook, of style and vocabulary, be-
tween different strata of the literature. But its chief
cogency arises from the fact that it offers an adequate
correspondence with the phenomena of the historical
and prophetical books and a reasonable interpretation of
the characteristics of the Pentateuch itself.
Stated as we have put it, the story may seem, if any-
thing, to have the defect of being too neat and tidy. It
must be realized that it has in fact a number of rough
edges, and on certain points there is still disagreement
1 These receive their names from the fact that in them the usual
name for God is respectively Jahveh and Elohim.
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 9
among leading scholars. Thus, for instance, the date and
place of origin of the earliest form of the Deuteronomic
Code is a matter of dispute; the materials of the Deutero-
nomic and Priestly Codes may in some cases be of much
higher antiquity than the completed codes which in-
corporated them; the exact relation of E to D, or of H
to Ezekiel, is hard to determine; the legal codes may at
various times have been subject to revision and modifica-
tion. But there is no serious challenge to the essential
points in the reconstruction.
In the first place, the view that the Pentateuch is a
unity is rejected as untenable. It is a composite product,
and its parts date from various centuries. The relative
dating of the documents is generally accepted. Nobody
calls in question the isolated position and late date of P;
and though some scholars would place the date of D, or
at least of D in an early form, before the sevjaith century,
while some would place it after the Exile, the almost
universal view is that in its present form it is pre-exilic,
that it is inspired by the prophecy of the eighth century
and is an attempt to express in cultus the moral and
spiritual ideas of those prophets, and that it was the text-
book of Josiah's reformation.
This being so, it follows that the purification of Jahvis-
tic theology is late, and was the work of Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, and Micah, and that the systematization of a
distinctive Jahvistic cultus is later still, following on the
higher ideas about God which those prophets had pro-
claimed. The history of Hebrew religion is therefore the
history of a religious evolution; this is the chief religious
conclusion from the work of scholarship, and it abolishes
c
ro IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
the 'static' view which had been that of conventional
conservatism.
Criticism and Archaeology
Recent archaeological discoveries have made no essen-
tial inroad upon the critical position, in spite of the ab-
surdly exaggerated claims that have sometimes in this
regard been made for them. So far as they go, the most
that they prove is the possibility that there may have been
written documents of Moses' time, from which some of
the Pentateuchal material may be derived: and that the
historical tradition embodied in certain parts of the Pen-
tateuchal narrative is better than criticism used to think,
or indeed had any right to think, before these discoveries
were made. 1 Archaeology therefore has added fresh data
1 In his recent book on Abraham (1936), Sir Leonard Woolley
accepts the critical analysis of the Pentateuch, but argues for the
substantial accuracy of the historical tradition of the patriarchal
period. 'There was no period in Hebrew history', he says, 'for which
contemporary written authority of one kind or another could not
possibly have existed. . . . Eut to suppose that the story of Abraham
in the form in which we have it in the Old Testament could have
been written in his own time or for many centuries after his own time
is to betray a complete ignorance of what men anciently wrote. . . .
As regards the purely narrative portion of the Biblical story of Abra-
ham, any written sources from which it is drawn must themselves be
of relatively late date and be ultimately based on an oral tradition
already very ancient; only a very few points, and those of minor
interest, could possibly depend on documents contemporary with the
events. . . . The oral tradition in itself is a very much more reliable
authority than certain critics have allowed. . . . Generally there was
in the story as originally told a fair substratum of literal truth . . .
and the patently poetical embellishments of later days do not mean
that there is no kernel of fact at all.' This shows just how archaeology
can supplement, modify, or support, the theories of criticism. It is
in refreshing contrast to the books which treat archaeology and
criticism as if they were a pair of dogs quarrelling over a bone.
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM n
for criticism to take into account, and has modified the
judgement that used to be passed on the historical
authority of the tradition. 1 But it has done nothing
whatever to impair at any vital point the solid coherence
of the critical reconstruction or to disprove the composite
character of the Pentateuchal literature. It is unfortunate
that some of those whose interests lie in archaeological
discovery should surrender to the temptation of setting
up an antagonism between archaeology and criticism and
should over-press the results of their special science as
they do. The external evidence revealed by the spade and
the internal evidence of the literature itself compose the
data upon which scholars have to work; and it is poor
scholarship which would seek to leave either out of the
reckoning.
Compared with this fundamental reconstruction of the
religious history, critical dealings with the rest of the Old
Testament are of subsidiary importance. It has become
obvious that the prophetical oracles of the pre-exilic and
exilic periods existed in largely fragmentary form, and
that the work of collecting them and apportioning them
(most of them being anonymous) to the various prophets
of the canonical list was the work of Jewish scholarship
Woolley fully recognizes that 'Higher Criticism is a specialized science
lying wholly outside the province of archaeology; the archaeologist
can only take over the findings of the critics. Fortunately 3 here there
is no need to follow implicitly the opinions of any one scholar a for
in spite of differences of view on points of detail the critics are so
completely in agreement on the main issues that the layman can
accept their broad results with confidence.'
1 A good synopsis of archaeological discovery and a reasonable
estimate of its bearings on Old Testament history is provided in
Caiger's Bible and Spade.
12 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
after the Exile; it cannot therefore be regarded as more
infallible than any other work of higher criticism. The
Psalter has been divided into five different books, and the
problem of its authorship has been frankly given up.
Nobody now would dream of claiming Davidic authorship
for the Book of Psalms. It is recognized that the poems
were the hymn-book of the second Temple, with many
later supplements, and that no clues to the authorship of
such a collection can be recovered. The main body of
apocalyptic literature lies outside the Canon; but within
it we have such sections as Joel, the later part of Zechariah,
Isaiah 24-7, and Daniel, about which the view has been
generally accepted that they date from the period of
apocalyptic speculation which began perhaps about 200 B.C.
and was at its height in the Maccabean era. Some still
attempt to argue for the exilic date of Daniel, but while
their arguments render it possible that some of the tradi-
tion in that book is pre-Maccabean, the book itself as it
stands cannot be assigned to an earlier date. Its historical
characteristics and its historical errors alike render such
a theory untenable. 1
In all this process of critical discussion, the argument,
as we said, has been kept by both sides mainly in the tone
of scientific scholarship. It is true that some have tried
to excite prejudice by speaking of 'destructive criticism',
though the whole tendency of Wellhausen's school has
been, while destroying a conventional picture of the pro-
cess of history to construct a new picture which should
more faithfully incorporate all the data. But such appeals
to prejudice have as a rule been the rare production of
1 The latest book on this subject is Rowley's. Darius the Mede.
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 13
those who, in the realm of scholarship, can only be con-
sidered camp-followers.
New Testament Criticism
But it has to be confessed that in regard to the New
Testament the work of scholarship has not been so free
from preconceptions on the part of those engaged in it.
Here the power of presupposition has strongly influenced
the arguments of scholars, and the conclusions of critics
have been biased by the moral and spiritual presumptions
with which they started, e.g. as to the reality of the super-
naturaf and its relation to the natural, or as to the possi-
bility of miracles. It is not too much to say that many
critics seem to have begun with a complete aversion from
any treatment of the New Testament which should make
the Christian interpretation in any way tenable. I have
little doubt that Strauss's Life of Jesus had a very adulterat-
ing effect on New Testament scholarship.
This criticism of the Gospels has often been guided by
the view that, miracles being impossible, you must allow
time for the growth of fictitious narratives of miraculous
events, and therefore the Gospels must be late; or that,
as the Gospels picture a person who makes supernatural
claims, or for whom such claims are made, and as such
claims cannot possibly be justified, one must allow time
for the transmutation of a mere moral teacher or social
reformer into a figure of supernatural status. One eccen-
tric school was even responsible for maintaining that
Jesus was only a mythical figure. In both these cases, as
we can see, the critical view would not be a work of pure
scholarship, but would be affected by a parti pris on other
14 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
grounds than the scientific evaluation of the existing data.
Here then it is unfortunately possible to speak of 'destruc-
tive' critics without feeling that one is using a question-
begging epithet; and this fact has undoubtedly caused New
Testament criticism in general to be less scientific and
more irresponsible in its dealing with the data than has
been the case with Old Testament criticism.
It may be conceded that the business of analysing the
sources, authorship, and relations of the New Testament
books has been well and scientifically done. In this sphere,
which is mainly independent of extraneous prejudice,
much good work has been accomplished. Various far-
fetched hypotheses have been put forward, e.g. that the
Gospels were historically valueless productions of the
second century, that the early Church was riddled by an
antagonism between Peter and Paul (the Tubingen theory),
that the Acts was a fabricated apologetic work of a very
late date, and so on. But all these have by now been con-
demned at the bar of scholarship itself. It is now seen
that the theory of a Petrine versus a Pauline Christianity
will not hold good and that the Pauline Epistles fall
congruously into place in the authoritative tradition of
the Apostolic Church. Investigation of the Synoptic prob-
lem has reached some results, which now stand beyond
question in the court of criticism, and which make it
certain that the evangelic tradition goes back to the
apostolic age of the Church. In relation to Acts, though
Harnack's volte-face) by which, from giving to the book a
date no earlier than A.D. 100, he reacted to a belief that it
was written before S. Paul's execution, has found few
followers, and though the problem of the exact historicity
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 15
of Acts 1-15 is still a problem, yet it may be said that few
could now be found to dispute the Lukan authorship of
Acts or to question the excellence of its historical quality.
German and English Scholarship
But if the work of analysis has been well done, that of
reconstruction has been by no means so satisfactory, be-
cause there the power of prejudice has been much more
directly at work. One may say, broadly, that the issue
has been and to some extent is still being fought out
between the German and the English schools. German
scholarship has been marked by immense learning, aston-
ishing industry, and a superabundant ingenuity. Almost
no hypothesis was too wild for some section of the German
school to support with a wealth of learned argument. But
it often gave one the impression of an entire irresponsibi-
lity with regard to the Christian Faith, and an inability
to see the whole range of facts which have to be accounted
for; and this is ultimately unscholarly. One can always
learn from the German critics, but one must beware of
swallowing their theories without rigorous examination.
They had the disadvantage of sitting loose to all Christian
tradition; and thus their theories seemed to explain every-
thing except the existence of the Christian religion and of
the Christian Church, which after all are solid facts which
no theory can be excused from leaving out of the reckoning. x
On the other hand, the English school of criticism, while
neither so learned nor so ingenious as the German, is
1 The great age of German Biblical scholarship seems to have ended
with the War. Since then, German Protestant theology has been little
interested in Biblical studies. Even the Form-critics appear to have
aroused comparatively little interest in Germany.
i6 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
characterized by scholarly caution and sanity. Being, as
most of its members are, more strongly imbued with the
tradition of Christian orthodoxy, they insist in particular
that the supernatural explanation cannot be ruled out
a priori as impossible; that the data of the living Church
must be reckoned, inasmuch as the Church gave us the
New Testament; and that it is unhistorical not to insist
on preserving a real line of connexion between the Jesus
of the Gospels and the Christ of the Church. 1 English
scholarship is therefore, by contrast with the German,
marked by a strong sense of responsibility to the tradi-
tional interpretation of the evangelic record; and this not
merely in deference to orthodox prejudice, but also from
the really scholarly conviction that this tradition is itself
part of the data which have to be brought into considera-
tion, and that we must not dissect the documents as if they
were dead specimens of literature, but must remember
that they are the products of a living society and have only
been preserved to us at all because there was a living
society which both guaranteed and safeguarded them.
The purpose of this book is to provide a short account
of the present position of Gospel criticism; and in doing
so illustrations will be given of the general statements
which have been made above. But this chapter has been
devoted to the purposes of general introduction for two
main reasons: firstly, because there has been of late a
marked tendency to suggest that in consequence of recent
archaeological discoveries, the whole critical method with
1 The Riddle of the New Testament, by Hoskyns and Davey, is an
admirable treatment of the bearing of criticism on this fundamental
problem.
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 17
regard to the Old Testament has been exposed as false,
and a 'fundamentalist* attack on criticism is once more
speaking confidently and even arrogantly. In regard to
this, it has been pointed out that the archaeological dis-
coveries, interesting and important as some of them are,
only touch the side-issues of the critical theory; the main
position is unshaken. The Pentateuch may contain better
historical traditions than was once supposed. But that it
is composed of different strata of narrative and legislation,
which cannot be contemporaneous with one another, that
it represents a process of ritual and ceremonial develop-
ment covering several hundred years, and that a theory of
religious evolution is alone consonant with the phenomena
of the historical and prophetic books, is a conclusion which
no archaeological discovery has ever assailed, still less
undermined.
The second reason for our general introduction is to
make plain to the reader that, while we must not be blind
to the weaknesses which have shown themselves in the
critical treatment of the Bible, there is no reason to doubt
that in general the methods which have been applied are
not mere subjective fancies but a scientific exercise of
scholarship; judged by the test of scholarly consensus,
they have been used in such a way as to throw a flood of
light upon the books which compose the sacred volume.
NOTE
In dealing with Old Testament criticism, we have paid no
attention to the argument which has sometimes been drawn
against it from Our Lord's apparent testimony to the author-
ship of certain Old Testament passages, e.g. his attribution to
D
i8 IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM
Moses of the record of the institution of marriage at the crea-
tion, of the permission of divorce in the Pentateuch, or of the
episode of the Burning Bush, or his argument with regard to
the Davidic sonship of the Messiah, drawn from Psalm no.
How, it is said, can we doubt the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch, or at least of these passages, or the Davidic
authorship of Psalm 1 10, when we have such testimony as this ?
The answer to this question has been so repeatedly given
that we should not here reiterate it were it not that the ques-
tion seems still to produce difficulty in the minds of some who
are either untrained in the principles of Biblical scholarship or
are completely encrusted with fundamentalist prejudice. 'The
law of Moses' was the Jewish term for the Pentateuch, though
Jewish scholars themselves admitted that some passages at
least were not from the pen of Moses. Moses was the primal
legislator of Israel, and therefore all laws were regarded as
his, either directly or derivatively. The argument which Our
Lord puts forward in no way depends on the question of
authorship. The nature of marriage rested on the purpose of
God, not on the Mosaic authorship of the Creation-story.
The permission of divorce was part of the sacred law; whether
Moses enacted it or not made no difference to this. The story
of the Burning Bush was a story about Moses; it did not
matter who wrote it.
The quotation from Psalm no can be similarly dealt with.
To the Jews the Psalms were the Tsalms of David', because
David was the prototype of Psalmists as Solomon was of wise
men. The Jews would therefore accept an ascription in the
Psalms of honour to the Messiah as proceeding from 'David',
and Our Lord was interrogating them on the ground of
assumptions which they made. He in no way thereby
committed Himself to sharing their assumption. Whatever
His purpose, it was not to introduce]a higher critical discussion
as to the authorship of the Psalm in question.
Whether He as man knew or did not know the truth about \
IN DEFENCE OF CRITICISM 19
such matters, is a problem that is connected with the more
general problem of the limitations of His knowledge in His
incarnate condition. This was fully treated by Bishop Gore in
his famous essay in Lux Mundi. It is only necessary to refer
to that, the general position of which in regard to this particular
question has long,been accepted by intelligent Christians. Our
Lord's infallibility as a spiritual guide does not necessarily lead
to the inference that He was infallible in matters of mere
mundane knowledge.
Finally, it may be added that the claims of honesty and truth
in matters of scholarship must not be disregarded in the inter-
ests of a particular theory as to the exact mode of the Incarna-
tion. If it is true that the Pentateuch is not Mosaic, and that
Psalm no is not Davidic, then no service to true religion can
possibly be done by resorting to shifts in order to deny it. No
truth that really matters can possibly be impaired by any other
truth; for all truth is of God.
II
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM AND THE FOURTH
GOSPEL
IN the realm of Old Testament study we have seen that
criticism has gained at least two assured results : Firstly,
that the Pentateuch is a composite body of literature. The
analysis of the documents comprising it into J, E, H, D,
and P is a massively cogent result, which no Old Testa-
ment scholar can go back upon. There may be room for
endless variety of opinion on secondary details; but it
can be no longer denied by any responsible scholar that
the Pentateuch as it stands cannot be Mosaic, that it is a
compilation of laws and regulations of widely different
dates, representing a progress from primitive simplicity
to elaborate ritual and advanced ethics and religion, and
that much of it is plainly influenced, in its present form,
by the spiritual ideals of eighth-century prophecy.
The second great result of critical study is the general
principle by which the prophetical and other literature
of the Old Testament has been analysed; e.g. that the
books of the pre-exilic prophets are collections of separate
oracles, the attribution of which to their supposed authors
can only be judged by their congruity with the existing
data; that the books of the Wisdom-literature, such as
especially the Book of Job, belong to a definite period after
the exile in which such speculations were in vogue; that
the Psalter is a conglomerate of liturgical hymnology; and
that the apocalyptic sections of the Old Testament must
be dated to the time when, with the feeling that prophecy
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 21
was at an end, apocalyptic vision took its place in the bad
times of the Syrian tyranny over the Jews, There is, of
course, a great deal of uncertainty in regard to many
details : e.g. there are sections in the prophets which cannot
be exactly dated or convincingly interpreted and, though
the Book of Daniel is Maccabean, it may incorporate
stories of an older tradition. But the general principle of
analysis is settled, and the victory of criticism in regard
to this is final.
It would be possible to reckon similar successes of
criticism in relation to the books of the New Testament:
e.g. the establishment of the corpus of Pauline literature,
whereby Hebrews has been excluded, the Pastoral Epistles
have been declared to be post-Pauline though containing
Pauline sections, and the other epistles (with some doubts
as to Ephesians) have been vindicated as by S. Paul; or
the conclusion that the Book of the Revelation is not by
the author of the Fourth Gospel, and that the Book of
Acts is by the same writer as the Third Gospel, probably
S. Luke. But we are here specially concerned with the
signal triumph of the critical method in the analysis of the
sources of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and
Luke) and of their relations to one another.
The Synoptic Problem
It would be a task as endless as unnecessary to give a
list of the great scholars who both in England and on the
Continent, especially in Germany have made contribu-
tions, whether of primary or of subsidiary importance, to
the solution of the Synoptic problem. It is enough to say
that there can be no important aspect of the interrelation
22 THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM
of the language and thought of these three Gospels which
has not been exhaustively considered, reconsidered, and
estimated in regard to other aspects; and that as a result
of all this co-operative study, certain conclusions have
been reached which may, so far as such language can ever
be used in a matter of this sort, be regarded as universally
or generally accepted by scholars. These conclusions
admit therefore of being briefly stated:
There is a large amount of evangelic record which is
found in all three Gospels; told in different words and
not always in the same order, yet the narratives deal with
the same incidents or preserve the same teaching. Careful
examination of the phenomena of these resemblances has
convinced scholars that the material as found in Matthew
and Luke is drawn from Mark; that Mark therefore was
a written source which both the other evangelists had
before them. This, then, is the earliest of the three Gos-
pels; and while we cannot be sure that nobody had pre-
viously attempted to write a connected story of the life
and teaching of Jesus, and while there are sections of Mark
in which it looks as if a piece of narrative had already
assumed fixed form (perhaps even written form) before he
used it, yet the impression given by the Gospel in general
is that, so far as its material is concerned, it was the first
essay in consecutive narrative.
There is also in Matthew and Luke a large amount of
material which is not in Mark, but where the similari-
ties between the First and Third Gospels are of such a
character that once again scholars are convinced that they
must be drawn from a common written source. There is
no existing document which could have been such a
AND THE FOURTH GOSPEL 23
source, and therefore scholars have been driven to suppose
that such a document (or documents) containing this
material formerly existed and was used by the two
evangelists. This document they call Q (from the German
Quelle source), 1 and believe that it must have been a
Palestinian production or from Syrian Antioch, written
as early as or even earlier than Mark, since it seems pos-
sible that S. Mark was acquainted with the source in some
form or other, oral or written. The exact limits of the
record in this document are impossible to define, since
we cannot be sure if it contained material which was not
used by either of the two evangelists, or if it overlapped
Mark to such an extent that the two evangelists may have
been indebted to it for material which is also in Mark.
But that some such document is the main source for the
non-Markan matter which is common to Matthew and
Luke is a conclusion to which the great majority of synop-
tic scholars can see no alternative.
Beyond that which is accounted for as derived from
either Mark or Q, we find in Matthew or in Luke material
which the one or the other singly records, and which can
only be accounted for as reaching them from either oral
or written tradition. The source of this special matter in
Matthew cannot be further specified. For Luke, it is sup-
posed that he had access to private information, upon
which he has largely drawn for the material, which this
Gospel alone preserves. 2
1 But for another explanation of the symbol, cf. Lightfoot's Bamp-
ton Lectures, p. 27.
2 Dr. Streeter suggests that S. Luke began with a knowledge of Q
and the possession of this private information, that from this he wrote
a first draft of an incomplete account, which he later completed by
24 THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM
That this analysis is completely hypothetical is obvious.
Nothing else but hypothesis is possible under the circum-
stances, since we have no direct information as to the
sources used in the compilation of their Gospels by the
evangelists. It is plain also that some parts of the theory
are more uncertain than others, and that there is room for
much difference of opinion as to the possibilities of revision
or redaction by the evangelists or by others, and as to the
exact reference of this or that incident to one or the other
of the main sources. But the general consensus of New J
Testament scholars is to the effect that this hypothesis,
in its main essentials, best accounts for the characteristics
of similarity and difference which are found in our existing
Gospels. 1
The Fourth Gospel
That John's Gospel is the latest of the four has never
been denied. But in regard to many other points of pri-
mary importance in the criticism of this Gospel, scholar-
ship is still marking time. Thus, as to its authorship, the
only point upon which most scholars agree is that, as we
have it, it cannot have been written by S. John the son of
Zebedee. Fifty years ago it used to be often treated as a
spiritual fiction of the early second century, which had no
claim to be regarded as possessing historical authority.
But the tendency has of late been to gravitate back from
the addition of material from Mark, after he had come to know the
Second Gospel. This theory has been accepted by some other
scholars; but I fancy that the general trend is against it.
1 Excellent statements of these views may be found in Redlich,
The Student's Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels, or Rattey, The
Gospels.
AND THE FOURTH GOSPEL 25
this sceptical position and to bring the Gospel into closer
relation with the Synoptic tradition and with history.
The combination of history and interpretation in the
Gospel is inextricable; it is usually very difficult to say
where, e.g. Our Lord's words end or are intended to end
and meditation on them begins. But it is becoming more
and more clear that to treat the book as pure fiction is no
solution whatever; for the author shows a real interest in
the actual events of Our Lord's life on earth, and in certain
matters his testimony is coming to be much more highly
respected as supplementing or correcting that of the Synop-
tists. Thus there is much ground for believing that he is
correct in dating the Crucifixion as taking place on the
day of the killing of the Passover and not, as Mark seems
to say, on the day after the Passover meal. Again, his
record of several visits of Our Lord to Jerusalem is now
regarded as more likely to be true than Mark's, which only
speaks of one such visit, the last. Indeed, it has been
suggested that some of the events which Mark records as
taking place on this last visit may well have taken place
on previous visits and have all been put by S. Mark into
the time of the one visit which he explicitly records.
Moreover, the character of Our Lord's discourses in the
Fourth Gospel is clearly different from their character in
the Synoptic records. But while no wise critic would
commit himself to the view that one can treat the dis-
courses in this Gospel as the ipstssima verba of Jesus,
many would be prepared to maintain that in their context
the discourses may quite well be enlargements, or medita-
tions on actual words of Our Lord, and that in the charac-
ter and method of them the evangelist may have preserved
26 THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM
qualities which marked the teaching given within the
inner circle of disciples, and differentiated it from the
teaching given to the outside crowd. On the other hand,
it is generally agreed that the disputes in the Fourth
Gospel between Our Lord and the Jewish leaders reflect
the conditions of the later controversies between the
Church and Judaism. Finally, even with regard to the
placing of a cleansing of the Temple at the outset of the
public Ministry, and the raising of Lazarus, it is felt that
a great deal of cogent argument can be adduced to justify
hesitation before one regards as fictitious the record of the
Gospel as to these events.
Minor points which affect the process of criticism are
(a) the apparent presence of textual dislocations in the
Gospel, perhaps owing to the fact that it never reached its
final revision by the author: (6) uncertainty whether the
Gospel is all by one author; it is perhaps the more usual
opinion that it and the first Johannine Epistle are both
from the same hand; the Book of Revelation, however, is
generally supposed to be by somebody else.
In sum then, it is probably wise to agree with Howard,
in his valuable book on The Fourth Gospel in History and
Interpretation (1931), that whilst the Gospel cannot be
treated as a primary historical authority in general, secon-
darily and in details it appears to be based on authorita-
tive information from an eye-witness, whereby it some-
times corrects and sometimes supplements the Synoptic
story; but that its purpose of spiritual interpretation is
always dominant. The basis of its information may be the
record of somebody who, living at Jerusalem (perhaps a
young man of a Jewish priestly family), was eyewitness
AND THE FOURTH GOSPEL 27
enough to have heard Our Lord in His moments of inti-
mate fellowship, who had lived with Him and entered
into His ways of thought. The writer of the Gospel re-
garded this witness as one on whose authority reliance
could confidently be placed. The story is thus told to us
at one remove from the eyewitness, yet it is so told that
we can be sure that the writer was of spiritual kindred with
him. As Dr. Rufiis Jones says, 'Everywhere in these
writings we are impressed with the interior depth of the
author. We feel sure that, either inwardly or outwardly,
he has lain on Christ's bosom, and that his personal testi-
mony "of His fullness have we received", is profoundly
true.' 1
1 E.R.E., art. 'Mysticism' (ix. 90).
Ill
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
So far we have only considered the work of criticism in
its analysis of the sources of the Gospels. We have
now to examine the reconstruction of the evangelic story
which critics have attempted to make on the basis of this
analysis. We are concerned therefore no longer with the
question of authenticity, but with that of authority. To
what extent are the Synoptic Gospels to be accepted as
veracious accounts of the events which they relate? What
can be confidently received as a true narrative of what
Jesus of Nazareth said and did? Can we mark off certain
elements in the history of His life and teaching as due to
secondary causes, e.g. to the mistakes or additions of
copyists (though this is mainly a question for the textual
critic), to misunderstanding by the narrators of what
happened or was said, to the pictorial tendency of all
narration, to the desire of the Church to give authority in
the Gospel record to the doctrines about its Master at
which it had arrived or was arriving?
Prejudice and Criticism
It must at once be plain how liable a scholar may be,
in trying to answer such questions, to the influence of
subjective prejudice. A man who starts as a convinced
Rationalist (in the narrow sense of that term) is not likely
to bring scholarly impartiality to bear on a history in
which the belief in the supernatural plays so fundamental
a part as it does in the Gospel records. It may of course
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 29
be retorted that a Christian believer may be charged with
the opposite kind of prejudice; and that in fact is un-
deniably true. It may be the case that in a matter which
is so directly connected with one's fundamental philosophy
of life., entire impartiality is unattainable, and that nobody
can study the problems of the Gospels from a wholly de-
tached point of view. But at least let us be clear as to two
points:
Firstly, that the prejudice in favour of Rationalism is in
no way more respectable than the prejudice in favour of
the supernatural. The philosophy which believes in the
existence of a supernatural world impinging upon and in-
forming the natural has just as good credentials as the
philosophy of materialistic scepticism or of mere human-
ism; and the assumption, which rationalistic critics so
often make, that they may lay exclusive claim to a purely
scholarly impartiality is one which they have no right to
make or to expect others to accept.
Secondly, let us also give full weight to the fact that
not only is the New Testament full of the belief in the
supernatural, but that the whole history of the Christian
religion and of the Christian Church has proceeded on
the basis of this belief. To build up a supernaturalistic
story on the basis of a New Testament from which, so
far as possible, the supernaturalistic element has been
eliminated, is a feat of critical legerdermain which is
foredoomed to failure. The supernaturalistic explanation
does at any rate account for the facts, the rationalistic
explanation does not.
Rationalism, to put the matter plainly, is under an
inevitable handicap in dealing with Synoptic criticism,
30 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
as much as a tone-deaf man would be handicapped in
endeavouring to appraise the qualities of a Beethoven
Symphony or a Bach Mass. The latter might analyse its
construction, but he could not enter into its meaning.
The Rationalist may trace the sources in the Gospel narra-
tives, but he starts with a serious disability in attempting
to reconstruct a picture of what actually happened; for
the possibility that God actually interposed in human
history is one for which he has a, 'blind spot' in his mental
composition.
It is not necessary to give the whole story of the critical
treatment of the New Testament. For our purpose we
need go no farther back than the school of liberal Protes-
tantism, which was dominant in the field of Biblical
scholarship fifty years ago, and in which perhaps the
greatest and most representative name is that of Harnack. 1
This school was unquestionably influenced by the specula-
tions of David Strauss and Ernest Renan; the Life of Jesus
by the former was published in 1835, that by the latter in
1865. The former attempted to prove that the narrative
in the Gospels was simply a series of myths, the latter
reduced it to a beautiful fiction. Both writers were
violently opposed to any supernatural interpretation of
life, and reacted with especial force against every form of
ecclesiastical dogma. They were convinced and remorse-
less Rationalists.
The fashionable philosophy of the day was that of a
materialistic Monism for which nothing was credible save
1 Harnack's studies were primarily in Church history. But his
lectures in 1899 on What is Christianity, in which the authorship of
the Gospels is discussed, made him the spokesman of this school.
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 31
a view which treated Nature as a closed system of material
causes and effects. Ernest Haeckel (1833-1919) was the
best-known name among the propagators of this view,
which was very influential in the time of the Darwinian
discoveries when the new superstition of scientific infalli-
bility was misleading the world into the belief that every-
thing which happened could be explained in terms of
physical science.
In theology the dominant influence in Germany was
that of Ritschlianism, of which Pragmatism is the secu-
larized version. It pressed the distinction between Fact
and Value, and tended to the view that Religion was en-
tirely an affair of assenting to certain ideas as valuable, as
ideas which 'worked', and was little concerned with ques-
tions of fact and metaphysical reality. This standpoint
has had some influence in both Protestant and Catholic
circles. But it is certain that Protestant theology in Ger-
many found it especially congenial. It is in principle
anti-rational, and Harnack, for instance, distrusted meta-
physics. But in effect it allowed theologians to surrender
to the rationalist scepticism as to facts, whilst preserving
such elements as they desired to preserve, as being 'valu-
able' for human aspiration. Thus Ritschlianism did not
find it hard to make terms with Rationalism; and Rational-
ists have made gleeful use, or misuse, of the critical views
of this school.
Rationalism, Materialism, and Ritschlianism provided
the strongest, or at least the coarsest, ingredients in the
mental atmosphere in which the Liberal Protestant school
of Synoptic criticism attained its maturity. That in the
realms of pure scholarship this school did immensely
32 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
valuable work has already been stated. The severe scru-
tiny to which it subjected the Gospels, in order to analyse
their sources and their relation to one another, was an
effort of concentrated scholarship such as has been sur-
passed in no other field of human study; and many of its
results stand fast as permanently valuable. Of course,
even in respect to this part of their work, the cloven hoof
of prejudice could not entirely fail to show itself. But so
far as pure scholarship is concerned, it is worth noting
that Harnack at any rate set an example of candour and
readiness to modify his previous conclusions when he
became persuaded on grounds of scholarship that such a
course was right. A thrill went through the world of
scholarship when he published his latest works on the
Lukan writings, in which he professed himself ready to
believe that the Acts was a book from the third quarter of
the first century and may even have been written before
S. Paul's execution.
The Liberal Protestant Reconstruction
But in the work of reconstructing the Gospel story and
appraising the authority of its various elements, this
school's work has been adjudged far less satisfactory.
The Gospel records, as they stand, picture a prophet of
Nazareth who had become the divine Lord of Christian
Faith; and this process of Christological development is
to be seen not only in the Fourth Gospel, but also in
S. Paul, whose writings are the earliest evidences of the
Christian Society's views; and not only in S. Paul, but
also embedded in the Synoptic Gospels themselves, these
views, at any rate in germ and implication, are to be dis-
covered. What then was to be made of this fact? What
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 33
had Jesus been and claimed to be? What was primary and
what was secondary in the record? Had He been such
as the Synoptists obviously thought Him, or was this
interpretation of Him the work of Church dogmatization
infecting the record? This was the question which the
scholars of this school set themselves to answer.
Given their general presuppositions and the mental
air of the time, only one answer was open to them. They
could understand a man who was a moral teacher, the
preacher of an idealistic ethic, a social or political revolu-
tionary; such ideas 'worked'; and there was, in the evange-
lic record, much which appeared consistent with such a
view of Jesus, whether He was pictured as the greatest
of all Socialists, as the champion of the dispossessed, or
as a social Anarchist. On the other hand, the Christology
was the linch-pin of an ecclesiastical doctrinal system, the
sacramentalism was mystical and involved an acceptance
of the reality of the supernatural, and the eschatological
strand in Jesus' teaching (e.g. His preaching of a coming
Kingdom, of a catastrophic revolution in human affairs,
of a divine interposition to settle the spiritual issues of
human history) was, according to their ideas, outr^ un-
practical, couched in an obsolete form of thought and
speech, crass and enigmatical. Hence they drew their in-
ferences. The eschatology must be due in the main either
to misunderstanding of ordinary statements or to the
heated expectations of the Church in the strained times
of early persecution. The Christology was the product of
a naive application partly of Jewish prophecy and partly
of Pagan mythology; and immense ingenuity was dis-
played in correlating the story of the Virgin Birth, the
F
34 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
doctrine of the divine Saviour-Lord, the account of the
Ascension into heaven, with the myths of paganism. The
Sacramentalism was the result of the genius of S. Paul
importing the ideas and practices of Hellenistic religion
into the simple ethical ideal of the imitation of Jesus
which had been the primary motif of Christian devotion.
Jesus then had been the leader of a purely ethical
movement in religion. His movement had been ship-
wrecked by His Crucifixion. But by an effort of dogged
refusal to abandon His programme and of pious invention,
the Church had produced a myth of His Resurrection
from the dead based, perhaps, on some strong hallucina-
tions of vision and of His imminent Return as Messiah
to consummate His work. Thus his followers had con-
ferred upon Him a divine status; and the work of a
Hellenistically-minded S. Paul accounted for the rest.
S. Paul turned a Christian ethical society into a Christian
Church holding a Christian religion. The simple Galilean
message of moral idealism was covered by a massive
framework of dogmatic interpretation which provided an
elaborate system of salvation through Christ, with rites
and ordinances and a Creed.
So set out, it was clear that this school offered as the
primary and authoritative evangel that which Dr. Sanday
rightly called a 'reduced Christianity', by comparison with
the Christian Faith; it was clear too that it drove a deep
chasm of division between Jesus on the one hand, and
S. Paul, the Church, and the Nicene Creed on the other.
Jesus had been a mere human ethical teacher, whom S.
Paul and the Church had elevated into a divine Saviour,
the Son of God. Several of the writers of this school gave
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 35
sincere testimony of their appreciation of the personal
beauty of Our Lord's character and of the noble idealism
of His moral teaching. Some, it is true, tried to maintain
the view that He was a purely mythical figure, and that
the story of His life was as mythological as the stories of
mythical Saviours of heathen religions. But this section
was never regarded as more than an eccentric by-product
of ultra-critical tendencies. The impression made by the
Gospels was too vital to allow such an extravagance of
scepticism to become current in the circles of responsible
scholarship. But if this excess was avoided, the fact could
not be denied that, according to the reconstruction of this
school, Jesus had been but a leading member of a com-
paratively commonplace category, the category of the
moral idealist. He was but 'as one of the prophets*. Every-
thing in Him which was mysterious and other-worldly
was eUminated or reduced. The Christian interpretation
of Him was palpably untenable. Unitarianism was the
furthest possibility of rational faith. Christianity was re-
duced to nothing more than an ethical imitation of Christ;
and this Christ was but, at best, a man who had given
a superlatively beautiful example of life and preached a
superlatively noble ethical ideal. That He should in any
sense be the object of 'worship', that He should be re-
garded as effecting an atonement between man and God,
that He should be able to give His Body and Blood to
man to live by, was but a supreme instance of the way in
which men insist on deifying the objects of their ad-
miration. Men made Jesus Christ divine because they
so much wanted to believe that God was like Jesus
Christ.
36 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
The Decline of Liberal Protestant Criticism
This was the general standpoint of German criticism
of this school; and though Sanday and other British
scholars often uttered protests against its tendency, yet
British criticism was strongly influenced by it; and in
regard to the interpretation of the miraculous element in
the Gospel story, even Sanday, at the end of his life,
seemed to have gone over wholly to the anti-supernatural
camp. This general conception has made its way by now
into the coteries of conventional scepticism and may
still be found reigning in the productions of the Rationalist
Press Association and the columns of the Freethinker.
But in the sphere of free scholarship it has long ago begun
to fade out, as the result of examination and the continual
investigation of the phenomena of the Gospels. Liberal
Protestantism is now confined to a handful of conservative
Modernists.
In the first place, the dealings of this school with the
eschatological elements in the record were never felt to
be adequate. The eschatology is embedded in the very
earliest parts of the Gospel; 1 and the tendency in the
Apostolic Church seems to have been rather to mitigate
than to enhance its potency. Granted that Millenarian
Adventism continued to be a feature of Christian expecta-
tion for several generations, yet it is plain in the epistles
1 Streeter argues that this element is less strong in Q than in Mark,
and that it is enhanced in Matthew, though it declines in Luke. The
paradox, then, is one of an eschatological Mark-Matthew tradition
against a humanistic Q-Luke tradition. This may' well be true; but
the eschatological element is certainly not absent in Q, and it is very
strong in Mark.
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 37
of S. Paul, in S. Luke's writings, and above all in the
Fourth Gospel, that even within New Testament times
the leading teachers of the Church had felt the necessity
of damping down the fervour of such anticipations. The
eschatological strain in the Gospels was therefore part of
the primitive equipment of Church thought rather than
the product of a later age.
In the second place it came to be felt more and more
strongly that the very earliest Church had a dogmatic and
not merely an ethical conception of its Founder. The
supposition of an original merely ethical message was
found to be an illusion which rendered the transition to
even the earliest Church simply inexplicable. It was
frankly incredible that the personal disciples of Jesus
should have started the Church upon a course of thought
and belief which was an entire misconception of their
Master. However simple may have been the first Christo-
logy of the Church, it was a doctrine which gave to Him
a position of religious uniqueness. He was the object of
religious devotion and religious reference from the first.
The chasm between a merely moral teacher and a divine
Person was a chasm which had never in fact existed, 1 and
the making of this chasm was an error of critics and not
a reconstruction of events.
In the third place, the accusation that this school gave
us only a 'reduced Christianity* because it gave us only a
reduced Christ was felt to be fatal to its theory. The
seriousness of this objection was of course most felt by
those scholars who were also orthodox believers. But
even apart from such intelligible prejudice, the tendency
1 See Hoskyns and Davey, op. cit.
38 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
of scholarship was, on grounds of scholarship alone, to
judge that in making Jesus only one of a commonplace
class, criticism had condemned itself; that neither the
Gospels, nor the story of the Church, were intelligible at
all, if He was no more than that, however great a speci-
men of the type He might be allowed to be.
The break-down of this reconstruction was, strangely
enough, begun by Harnack himself. Attention has already
been drawn to the candour with which he executed a
volte-face on the subject of the date and quality of the
Acts. But if Acts was early and was good history, the
argument was bound to go on to consider in a new light
the Third Gospel, which was so unquestionably from the
hand of the same author. This had to be earlier than
Acts; and a writer who showed the quality of a good
historian in one book was likely to have the same quality
in his other. Thus the credibility of Luke was enhanced,
and the ascription of a dogmatic view of Christ to an
earlier epoch became necessary.
The intrusion of historians and archaeologists like
Ramsay into the sphere of Biblical criticism inevitably
forced into consideration the fact that these documents
were not just specimens of literature, to be dissected
coldly by the scalpel of the specialist critic. They were
the title-deeds of a live movement of live men; and no
treatment of them could be considered adequate which
did not take this fact about them into consideration. The
emphasis tended to shift from the inquiry into the docu-
ments as such to an inquiry into the Church which pro-
duced the documents, and to the spiritual processes at
work in the Church at the time. It was an enormous relief
THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL 39
to be called from the mere anatomy of a dead body of
literature to the vivisection of a live society, in relation to
whose life the documents were alone to be understood.
The advent of new knowledge about the pagan mystery-
religions had been at first taken up widely by sceptical
critics as providing a ready explanation of S. Paul's
sacramentalism; and of course there were clear and ob-
vious analogies between the two. But here in England
Dr. Edwyn Bevan and others were insistent in drawing
attention to the fact that the points of difference between
them were as plain as and in many respects more striking
and radical than the points of similarity. The power of
S. Paul's Jewish inheritance came more and more to be
recognized. The picture of an almost entirely Hellenistic
S. Paul was found to be fictitious; and the general conclu-
sion was reached that, whilst S. Paul's debt to Hellenism
could not be ignored, it only extended to superficial
characteristics; that the heart of the man was Jewish, and
that the groundwork of his Christian position could only
be discovered by supposing the impact of a tremendous
spiritual experience of Jesus, and the influence of a strong
Church tradition, upon a foundation of Jewish belief.
The relation between S. Paul and Jesus came to be seen
as more and more close and vital. In regard to details of
the Incarnate life he might exhibit limited knowledge or
interest; but he was the best commentator on and the
best interpreter of the moral teaching of Jesus; however
he had derived it, he possessed 'the mind of Christ* in
amazingly high degree; and the bridge between the Master
and His apostle became one which no scholarship could
treat as non-existent or as of minor importance.
40 THE LIBERAL PROTESTANT SCHOOL
Finally, the breaking up of the philosophy of materialis-
tic Monism left the way free for a scholarship which was
less crassly anti-supernaturalistic. After the heyday of
its triumphs in the Darwinian and post-Darwinian epoch,
Science, driven on by its own inner urge to investigate
and explain, was coming to find the universe something
which could not be read as a merely materialistic system.
Whilst science could not commit itself to acceptance of
the possibility of the New Testament miracles, it was
being forced every day to admit the presence of incalcu-
lable forces and tendencies in the processes of life, which
at any rate made it impossible any longer to deny outright
that those miracles might be credible. The postulate of
teleology (of a purpose working in things) once more
raised its head as a perfectly respectable hypothesis for a
scientific man to hold; and the reality of the supernatural
is something which nowadays the vast majority of leading
scientists would refuse to reject as inadmissible.
The Liberal Protestant school, therefore, deserted by its
own spokesman, wounded in the house of its friends by the
further investigations of scholars, and with the barometer
of scientific tendency no longer set fair for scepticism was
in a parlous plight. The way was clear for the coup de
grdce to be administered. We shall now see how once
more the occasion brought the man. 1
1 Harnack's own later writings appeared in 1905-8, and are there-
fore contemporaneous with Schweitzer's great book which appeared
in Germany in 1906.
IV
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
rwas in 1910 that there appeared in English a transla-
ion of Albert Schweitzer's book Von Reimarus zu
Wrede. The English translation was entitled The Quest of
the Historical Jesus; and it is no exaggeration to say that
the sensation which it created in the circles of New Testa-
ment scholars was analogous to that created in scientific
circles by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.
It was hailed as opening an entirely new point of view in
New Testament study, and as signalizing a revolution in
its main outlook on its problems. So great and so cautious
a scholar as Dr. Sanday gave the book emphatic and en-
thusiastic commendation; and English scholars were not
slow to follow his lead. Schweitzer was not ploughing an
entirely virgin field. Loisy's L'Bvangile et Ufiglise had
preceded him. He himself acknowledges his debt to other
precursors. But his book at once became the magnum
opus which all serious scholars must read and must take
account of. It is still a book which has a peculiar fascina-
tion, from its lucid presentation, from its wealth of learn-
ing, from its strong grip upon certain main principles,
and from the real reverence which marks its every sen-
tence and reaches a climax in its great last chapter.
Schweitzer
Schweitzer is an out-and-out eschatologist. To him
the eschatological interest in the Gospels is so uniquely
primary that by comparison nothing else counts. There
G
42 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
never was a more single-minded player of one rich string.
He finds the eschatological anticipation dominant in the
early Church, in S. Paul, and in the Gospels; and his
hypothesis is that it was equally dominant in Our Lord's
mind. This is the one key which opens all locks. Essen-
tially Jesus was neither a social revolutionary nor a moral
teacher, but the herald of a divine event. His whole soul
was concentrated on proclaiming the immediate coming
of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. The
ethical teaching ascribed to Him in the Gospels was either
due to the Church, which found itself forced to a task of
moral legislation, as the promised and expected End
delayed to come, or else, so far as Our Lord gave any
moral teaching at all, He meant it merely as an Interims-
ethik for the brief period before the End was to take place.
This is why it is so idealistic and, humanly speaking, so
impracticable. Neither Jesus nor the Church ever in-
tended it to be a code of moral principles for the use of
generations to come.
The coming Kingdom of God was therefore the keynote
of all that Jesus had to say. His ministry was for the sole
purpose of announcing its advent and telling men to be
ready for it. In the early days of His ministry He seems
to have thought that it would begin of itself. But later,
under the stress of opposition, of the delay in its arrival,
and of the sense of a great 'violence' to be wrought if it
was to result, He formed the notion that He must die in
order to make this result possible. He must die unrecog-
nized and unaccepted. He seems to have foretold that
after His death He would rise again and would come with
His disciples to set up the Kingdom. So He went to
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS 43
Jerusalem on His last journey with the deliberate purpose
not of teaching but of dying in order to force the coming
of the Kingdom. The Last Supper was an eschatological
Sacrament to bind His disciples to Him for the approach-
ing event. He died on the Cross, Schweitzer seems to
imply, in full expectation that His death would be the
signal for the inauguration of the new Era.
Here Schweitzer stops short. The Resurrection, as a
recorded event, is not dealt with at all. The next chapter
(which is the last of the book) passes at once from the
story of the Gospel record to an estimate of the abiding
Jesus. The Figure given to us by a process of rationalism,
liberalism, and modern theology, he says, never existed.
It is a product half-historical and half-modern. The real
Jesus, with His world-rejecting message, cannot be made
sympathetic or intelligible to the multitude, with its
world-accepting formulas. 'The historical Jesus will be
to our time a stranger and an enigma.' But the real im-
movable historical foundation of Christianity remains,
independent of any historical confirmation or justification.
'Jesus means something to our world because a mighty
spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our
time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by
any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Chris-
tianity. ... It is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as
spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time
and can help it. ... The abiding and eternal in Jesus is abso-
lutely independent of historical knowledge and can only be
understood by contact with His spirit which is still at work in
the world. In proportion as we have the Spirit of Jesus we
have the true knowledge of Jesus. . . . That which is eternal
in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based
44 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
on an eschatological world-view and contain the expression of
a mind for which the contemporary world with its historical
and social circumstances no longer had any existence. They
are appropriate, therefore, to any world, for in every world
they raise the man who dares to meet their challenge, and does
not turn and twist them into meaninglessness, above his world
and his time, making him inwardly free, so that he is fitted to
be, in his own world and in his own time, a simple channel
of the power of Jesus. . . . The true historical Jesus was not a
teacher, not a casuist; He was an imperious ruler. It was
because He was so in His inmost being that He could think of
Himself as the Son of Man. ... He comes to us as One un-
known, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came
to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same
word: 'Follow thou me'; and sets us to the tasks which He
has to fulfil for our time. He commands, and to those
who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will
reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which
they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an in-
effable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who
He is.'
This lengthy quotation, so disproportionate to the plan
of our book, has been given for two main reasons :
Firstly, because it is a fine piece of religious writing,
and may do something to save readers from the supposi-
tion that all critics are mere dry-as-dust scholars, who
have no interests save in the cold dissection of literary
documents. Nobody can resist the impression of deep
and real reverence for Our Lord which such a passage
exhibits. It contains many phrases which Christian Faith
may gratefully accept and make its own. And that this
was no mere piece of literary exaltation is proved by the
example of Schweitzer's own self-sacrifice in volunteering
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS 45
for work as a medical missionary in the Congo. This
action, taken, as his Autobiography reveals, in simple
obedience to the inspiration of Jesus* teaching, gives
eloquent testimony of the fact that the challenge of Jesus
came to him and that he obeyed its command. One be-
comes impatient, in face of this noble renunciation by
such a man, with the petty little orthodoxasts who would
denigrate him on the ground of scepticism as to the exact
intonation in which he pronounces the Christian shib-
boleth.
But the quotation will also serve to show how much
greater Schweitzer is than some of those who have followed
his lead in the path of New Testament scholarship. They
draw from him nothing but his scholar's reconstruction,
nothing of his Jesus-discipleship. They use his book
merely to set out the view that Jesus foretold the coming
of God's Kingdom, that He had nothing much to say
beyond that, and that He died on the Cross with His
expectation unrealized. Thus they take the great Enigma
that Schweitzer had so truly seen Our Lord to be, and
make of Him nothing but a vain Dreamer or a fantastic
Visionary 'as one of the apocalyptists'. But this very
circumstance that Schweitzer's theory can be so easily
turned into something so palpably inadequate to the fact
of Jesus, makes it clear that we cannot accept it in an
uncritical heat of admiration for Schweitzer's personal
example. We must try to examine what he has to say not
as the critical basis from which Schweitzer started for the
Congo, but as the critical basis upon which the eschato-
logical school has erected its reconstruction of the evangelic
story.
46 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
Critique of the Eschatological School
The strong points of the theory are obvious. It lays a
clear line of connexion between the teaching of Our
Lord and the powerful Adventist expectation of the early
Church. It gives full weight and significance to the
eschatological phrases which so continually recur in the
teaching attributed to Jesus. It reasserts strongly that
which is mysterious, challenging, and other-worldly in the
Gospel figure of Jesus, which the liberal theory had
heavily discounted. As the herald of a divine irruption
into the world, He is presented as an enigmatic personage,
exercising a possibly unique position in human history.
So far the theory may be said to have enormous value. It
has destroyed the easy Modernism of liberal Protestantism,
and Gospel criticism can never be as if Schweitzer's book
had not been written.
All this we may admit and yet feel a strong doubt
before accepting the reconstruction of Schweitzer as an
adequate story of what Our Lord really was. We need
not confuse the issue by entering into details of Schweit-
zer's dealing with Jesus' alleged moral imperatives and
of his interpretation of various phenomena in the Gospel
record. For the crucial criticisms are these:
Firstly, it is an unconvincing simplification to present
the moral teaching in the Gospels as only incidental and
temporary in its reference. Can we really agree that
Jesus laid down no moral principles for universal applica-
tion, and that the very idea of a system of Christian morals
is a mistake? If ever there was a moral imperative which
gave the impression of being designed urbi et orbi, it is
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS 47
that of the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the
Prodigal Son.
Secondly, we may admit that eschatological expectations
were very active in the early Church, and that they
gradually died down, as the Event delayed to come; this
reduction of eschatology, as has been said, is seen at work
in S. Paul and in S. Luke and still more in the Fourth
Gospel. But the transition, by which the Advent expecta-
tion became an ideal, seems to have been made without
any mental dislocation. The Church settled down, before
the Gospels were written, to a long-term programme of
preparation for an event which was now coming to be
placed in an indefinite future. The Synoptic Gospels
proceed exactly from the period when this settling-down
process was in full swing; and yet they record both
eschatological and ethical teaching quite impartially and
without any sense of inconsistency. 1 Can this be other-
wise explained except by the supposition that both ele-
ments were present in the accepted tradition and may
therefore have been present in Our Lord's authentic
teaching? Certainly the 'signs of the Spirit* were soon
felt to consist in moral and spiritual qualities as truly as
in activities which had a more directly eschatological
reference (Acts n 24 ; i Cor. I2 31 ); and the great argument
of the Apologists of the second century rested on the
moral difference which had taken place in the lives of
converts.
Thirdly, we have to ask, is the Resurrection of Christ a
fact or not? Schweitzer speaks great words about a Jesus
1 Cf . a valuable study of the eschatology of the Gospels in Dodd's
Parables of the Kingdom.
48 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
who arises in men's hearts, and who comes to men in
every age to call them to follow; and his own life shows
that to him this means a really practical challenge. But
who gives the challenge? Is it a Figure of history, whose
inspiration lies only in the power of His recorded sayings?
Or is it a Present Deity, the living Son of God, whose
inspiration lies in His present intercession? Does Jesus
still in Person lead captivity captive and give gifts to men,
or only through the abiding power of the example which
He gave while He was on earth? Is He, in short, the
strong Son of God, or is He only a great Idea once in-
carnated in an historical life? One feels that Schweitzer
has never given us an explicit answer to this question;
and one feels that, till he answers it explicitly, one must
still be in doubt as to the adequacy of his picture in this
respect. For without the guarantee given to Jesus by the
fact that God raised Him from the dead, what security
have we in believing that His teaching and challenge are
really from God and not from man? It is imperious
enough, beyond doubt; but is it the imperiousness of
divine authority or of human idealism?
Finally, may it not be the case that the key which
Schweitzer would apply is in its way as much too small
for its purpose as the key to which the school of Harnack
trusted so exclusively? The older school read Jesus as
one with a programme of moral idealism. The new
school reads Him as the herald of a divine event. But
does He not seem to have been both of these, and more?
What if His only business in His incarnate life was just
to be Himself, 6 &v> He that is, God in man, and that
everything else was to be left to follow from this as God
THE ESCHATQLOGISTS 49
pleased and man was docile. That Schweitzer himself
may see a much bigger Jesus than his successors always
see has been already allowed. But does the theory necessi-
tate such a reading? Or does it fail to account for all the
data, just because they are too rich to be included all in
one treasure-house? There is paradox and tension be-
tween eschatology and humanism (between Mark and
Luke) at the heart of the Gospel. The earliest Church
was, it seems, both dogmatic and ethical. The earliest
Christian teaching linked Christian grace and Christian
morals together in an articulately composite unity; the
Christians observed sacramental rites, and also sought to
grow in Christiike virtue; they spoke of an imminent
Advent, and also set themselves to a programme of work
to cover the whole world and all time. The amazing
audacity and comprehensiveness of this outlook does not
look like committee-work or community-policy, not even
if it be a committee of apostles and a community of the
elect. The same paradox, with all its apparent contradic-
tions, is seen in the recorded teaching of Our Lord. He
speaks now of a Kingdom to come catastrophically, now
of one that is growing in human society. He gives two
commandments, of duty to God and of duty to men. His
life revolves round two poles, God whose will He is to
do and whose business He is about, and man whom He
came to save and dies to redeem. The one unfailing
impression which the record gives is of a rich simplicity
in a manifold variety. May it be that the richness is too
great and too varied to be capable of being cast up in one
account-book, whether the principle of reckoning be that
of eschatology or of ethics?
H
50 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
The Impasse of Scholarship
So, it seems, we are landed in an impasse. The issue
has ended in a stalemate. For the time, at least, no further
effort of reconstruction along either of those lines is
possible, and scholarship, if it is to be still progressive,
will have to embark on a new field of adventure. How it
is doing so will be the subject of our next chapter. But
meanwhile attention may be drawn to Professor Guigne-
bert's huge book on Jesus, of which the English translation
was published in 1935. ^ * s a tremendous achievement
of learning and minute scholarship. There seems to be
no work bearing on the subject which the author has not
read. The greater is the pity that he seems to have the
temperament which makes him incapable of reading the
Gospels themselves. The book is almost monumentally
unsatisfying. It manages with consummate skill to com-
bine the inadequacies of both theories into a vast corpus
of inadequacy, to which credit could hardly be done ex-
cept by a volume of rebuttals. It is a perfect illustration
of the critical game of peeling the onion. Sheath after
sheath comes off. Our Lord is deprived of the Virgin Birth,
the Transfiguration, most of His supposed teaching, the
Church. He did not believe Himself to be the Messiah,
not even a suffering one. He taught no morals for the
future. He was only a belated member of the prophetic
series. His career lasted only three or four months. So
the sheaths come off one by one, until we are left with a
Jesus who indeed is allowed to have existed, but of whom
the gigantic impossibility of the equation Jesus = o is
perhaps almost as much as we can predicate.
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS 51
When we study the grounds for this extreme of scholarly
scepticism, we find them to consist firstly in a completely
subjective bias against the supernatural as a possible ex-
planation of everything. The author is dogmatically
rationalistic in his prejudgement of every question. In
the Foreword by M. Henri Berr we are asked to recognize
'the detachment of the author', who avoids 'alike a dog-
matic prejudgement of the question at issue and a rational-
istic bias'. Few books can ever have done less to justify
such a claim.
Secondly, the book proceeds from start to finish on the
remarkable assumption that Jesus could be capable of
nothing which was not characteristic of his Jewish milieu.
He is not allowed any originality whatsoever, not even
as much as would be conceded to such prophets as Amos
and Hosea. All in the Gospels that is not Jewish common-
place is Pauline or Hellenistic a handily vague term
which is invoked to explain everything that will not
square with the preliminary assumption. We have, in fact,
the old antithesis between the Nazarene Jesus and the
glorified Christ which, so used by this as by former
scholars, simply makes the history of Christianity unin-
telligible. If one thing is certain, it is that the Christian
Church and the Christian religion would never have come
into existence at all if Jesus had been no more than
M. Guignebert will allow; since they did come into
existence, it seems clear that the author has not taken
account of all the data. The book has been described
with entire justice as s an admirable synopsis of a dead
scholarship'.
Up to this point, then, scholarship has taken us; and
52 THE ESCHATOLOGISTS
from the whole process the following constructive infer-
ences may be confidently drawn:
(1) All theories which deny the historic fact of Jesus
are exploded. Even for Guignebert's scepticism this is
too much. No form of Christ-myth theory can survive
the test of exegesis; and the view which makes of Him
a mere cult-hero is going the way of the earlier view
which saw in Him a solar myth.
(2) That the Christian tradition recorded in the Gospels
is of early date is certain. The exact dates at which our
four Gospels were written may never be finally settled.
But the weight of evidence seems to be on the side of
placing Mark before A.D. 70, though perhaps only two or
three years before, Luke and Matthew between A.D. 75
and 90, and John at the close of the first century. The
tradition which they incorporate must therefore go back
into the early apostolic period; and Q can hardly have
been written later than A.D. 60 and may be some years
earlier; it may have been a Greek translation of an
Aramaic book of sayings of Jesus that had been written
as early as A.D. 50.
(3) It is really remarkable to notice how the Person of
Christ eventually determines the argument. Critical theo-
ries try to fit Him into their several moulds of interpreta-
tion; but He always breaks the mould. We can be more
sure than ever that He is a real Person, too vital to be the
product of myth-making, and too big to be cabined in any
one category of human interpretation; a great originative
Personality, who lived and taught and endured in such a
way that His followers were able to believe and to attest
the sincerity of their belief by every possible evidence
THE ESCHATOLOGISTS 53
that He had opened to them the road of salvation and was
providing a living fount of divine inspiration for the life
of discipleship. This conclusion is one which a sane and
well-balanced criticism seems unable to evade. Whether
the Christian explanation of their belief is right or not is
a matter to be argued by faith and not by scholarship.
But the process of scholarship leaves it open as a reason-
able commentary on the facts.
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
main lines along which Gospel criticism has gone
during the past two generations have been summarized
in our preceding chapters. It will be noticed that in spite
of their salient differences in the reconstruction which
they have severally offered to us, they have proceeded on
the same general method and have had the same general
objective. The method has consisted of an analysis of
the Synoptic Gospels into their parts, of a reference of
those parts to their several sources in Mark, Q, L, M; in
the results so reached a very large measure of unanimity
has been attained amongst the members of all schools of
scholarship. The objective has then been to go behind
the sources and inquire which elements in these can be
considered as primary and which as secondary; what was
the original message and life of Jesus? In answering this
question we have observed how their presuppositions in-
fluenced the Harnack school to insist on the primariness
of the ethical, while the Schweitzer school regarded the
eschatological as the primary subject of Jesus' preaching.
But in either case the objective was to frame a portrait of
Jesus apart from the Church, a portrait abstracted from the
Gospel records, after these had been dissected and as-
signed among their various sources.
Emphasis on the Oral Period of Tradition
Of late, however, Gospel criticism has embarked on a
fresh line, and has entered on an adventure which, though
to the full as speculative as that of former critics, is at
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 55
least more modest in its professions. Source-criticism is
not denied, but the new criticism goes behind the written
sources and seeks to trace the Church at work. It is more
concerned in the formation by the Church of the Jesus-
tradition than in the question of the Jesus-of-history. It
raises of course the further question of the relation of the
tradition to history; and we shall see that some of these
critics are very sceptical on that point; they are prepared
to say that the tradition was formed with very little
reference to history. But this is a further point which does
not necessarily arise from the pure application of the
form-critical method.
Previous critics had of course allowed whether they
were conservative or sceptical that the Gospels were not
written at once, and that a time of oral tradition must have
preceded the first attempt to reduce the tradition, or any
parts of it, to written form. But this period had been
regarded as so largely unknown that no attempt was made
to particularize as to the nature of its activities in record-
making. Apart from scattered and elusive indications in
Acts and S. Paul's Epistles, there was no definite informa-
tion 1 for scholars to go upon except the familiar quotation
from Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis in the earlier half of
the second century, where he professes to be giving in-
formation derived from a presbyter who may have been
called John, and may have been alive in A.D. 100. 'This
the Elder 2 said: Mark, who had been Peter's interpreter,
wrote down carefully, though not in order, the sayings
1 But see note at end of chapter as to the evidence of the Prologues
in some manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate.
2 He does not give the Elder's name.
56 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
and doings of Christ, so far as he remembered them. For
Mark was neither a hearer nor a follower of the Lord, but
was later a follower of Peter, who used to give teaching
as necessity demanded, but not making, as it were, an
arrangement of the Lord's oracles. So that Mark com-
mitted no error in thus writing down some things as he
remembered them'; while of Matthew Papias says that
'he composed the oracles (logia) in the Hebrew tongue,
and everybody interpreted them for himself as he was
able'. On the basis of this passage not only was a theory
built up that S. Mark's Gospel was practically a verbatim
reproduction of the stories which S. Peter used to tell,
but also a general picture was drawn of early Church-
meetings, in which either eyewitnesses narrated their
personal experiences or those who had heard such narra-
tives reproduced them. This was the period of oral tradi-
tion, and the Gospels or their sources were the written
form which this oral tradition assumed. It was therefore,
to orthodox critics who started from this basis, a matter
of first-rate importance to bring the Gospels as near as
possible to apostolic authorship. S. Mark had S. Peter
to rest on, S. Luke was a companion of S. Paul; but the
authorship of Matthew and John was less easy to decide,
and conservative scholars felt that reliance on these Gos-
pels could not be so confidently demanded if their con-
nexion with an apostolic eyewitness were in doubt.
Hence arose their eagerness to argue that the logia to
which Papias referred were either the Gospel of S. Matthew
or at least its groundwork, and the persistence with which
they refused to give up belief in the apostolic authorship
of the Fourth Gospel.
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 57
Farm-criticism
The particular originality of the new type of criticism
lies in suggesting that from an investigation and classifica-
tion of the very stories which have been preserved for us
in the Gospels, some indications can be derived as to the
way in which they were preserved in the oral period.
This new type is called Form-criticism (in German
Formgeschichte = Form History), because it studies the
formative period of oral tradition, and tries to discern
the 'forms' in which the evangelic stories had been told in
that period, and to decipher the story of the development
up to the period of written Gospels. This criticism, which
has been for some time active in Germany under the
leadership 1 of such writers as Dibelius, Bultmann, Albertz,
Bertram, and Fascher, is only now beginning to come
through to England. Dibelius's book, under the title
From Tradition to Gospel, was only published in an
English translation in I934. 2 There is a short account of
these views in Rawlinson's St. Mark (1925), and discus-
sions of them are to be found in Easton's The Gospel
before the Gospels (1928), in Vincent Taylor's The Forma-
1 The principles of Formgeschichte were first (so far as I know) laid
down by Johannes Weiss in his article 'Literaturgeschichte des N.T.'
in the encyclopaedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (vol. iii,
2nd edition, 1912). The present generation of Form-critics do not
refer to this article, though Fascher reckons Weiss's earlier book Das
Alteste Evangelium (1903) as a forerunner of Form-criticism. But
Bultmann was a pupil of J. Weiss, and Dibelius became Professor
of the New Testament at Heidelberg in 1915, thus presumably
succeeding Weiss, who died in 1914. It seems probable therefore
that Weiss's teaching, which, the article contains, may be the fans et
origo of Form-criticism.
2 He has also published in English an admirably constructive
statement entitled Gospel Criticism and Christology.
I
58 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
tion of the Gospel Tradition (1933)3 and in a section of
Lightfoot's Bampton Lectures for 19343 published in
1935 with the title History and Interpretation in the Gospels.
British scholarship has therefore only begun to examine
this theory with any attention. But its main gist is not
hard to expound:
It goes, as has been said, behind the Gospel sources to
the period when tradition was forming in the Church, and
its chief suggestion is that the stories of Our Lord's sayings
and doings were then being told as separate anecdotes,
preserved for the needs of Christian preaching, edification,
apology, or moral counsel, as the working materials for a
great missionary movement. The early Church, expecting
the End to come soon, was unconcerned with merely
historical or biographical interest. All that it cared for
was the kind of story which would be of help to it in
dealing with its own problems and aspirations. Both the
selection of the stories and the shape which they took were
influenced or determined by the necessities, hopes, and
beliefs of the Church.
The classification of the stories is, broadly speaking, as
follows : (i) Short narratives which end in a striking saying
of Jesus which had reference to questions of faith and
practice. These are called Paradigms by Dibelius, Apo-
phthegms by Bultmann, Pronouncement-stories by Taylor
(it is a confusing fact that this criticism has not yet settled
down to an agreed terminology). (2) Narratives told as
the setting for a miraculous act performed by Jesus.
Dibelius calls these Tales, Bultmann Miracle Stories.
(3) Sayings of Jesus, such as wisdom-words, prophetic
and apocalyptic words, law-words and community-rules,
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 59
'I words', and parables. (4) Stories about Jesus, called
Myths or Legends, i.e. narratives which explain a rite or
the origin of cosmic phenomena, or describe the actions
of a divine Being. Examples are the stories of the Baptism,
the Transfiguration, and the Resurrection, the activity of
the Baptist, the Temptation, and the Birth Stories in
Matthew and Luke.
Now, so far, this theory is not disconcerting to any but
a literalist faith. Nor can it be said to be in itself strikingly
improbable, even if one may be inclined to feel that the
classification is to too large an extent based on subjective
impressions and merely speculative analysis. Professor
Burkitt has a right to ask whether there is 'any evidence
that early Christian missionaries were ever accustomed to
enforce their announcement or defence of the new Religion
by telling little anecdotes, traditional or invented, about
Jesus'. 1 But in itself and essentially, the theory is only a
more elaborate statement of something which scholarship
has for some time generally recognized. For a strong
reaction had already set in against the old-fashioned view
of S. Mark as practically a verbatim reporter of S. Peter's
anecdotes. Scholars were already insisting that the oral
tradition of the Church underlies all the Gospels, that
many or most of the narratives probably existed in dis-
connected fragments and were preserved because of their
relation to the Church's own needs, and that in the Gos-
pels, even in Mark, a doctrinal purpose was plain. 'No-
where in the New Testament are events recorded or
referred to simply as events. The events are set in a
theological context and their record serves a theological
1 Journal of Theological Studies, April 1935, p. 187.
60 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
purpose.' 1 They are not biographies but portraits; and a
portrait differs from a photograph in that it contains
something of the artist's own faculty of appreciation and
interpretation. It was clear that each evangelist was
particularly possessed by interest in a specific aspect of
Christ's personality. Thus in Mark Jesus is the Messiah
of prophecy, in Luke He is the inspiration of a catholic
universalism which cares nothing for distinctions of race
or sex, in Matthew He is the giver of the new Law, while
John sees Him as the Word of God made flesh and
tabernacling among us. The new criticism allows full
scope for this diversity of Church interest, for this selec-
tivity of aspects in Our Lord's manifold personality.
- Examination of Form-critical Theory
But the itch of scepticism and the virus of presupposi-
tion against the supernatural is still at work in leading
some of these critics to deny the historical veracity of the
Gospels. That the Church selected among the stories is
one thing, but it is another thing to hold that the Church
invented the stories. And some of our form-critics do
this; thus Bultmann roundly says that 'the community
creates myths'; to Bertram Jesus is a mere cult-hero with
no pretence to historicity; and even Lightfoot ends his
lectures by saying: 'It seems that the form of the earthly
no less than of the heavenly Christ is for the most part
hidden from us. For all the inestimable value of the
gospels, they yield us little more than a whisper of His
voice; we trace in them but the outskirts of His ways.'
At this point then we have a right and a duty to call a
1 Hoskyns and Davey, op. tit., p. 12.
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 61
halt so as to examine the theory with more particularity in
order to see how far it is really satisfactory and, especially,
whether it justifies or necessitates inferences so sweeping
and so disconcerting to Faith. The following comments
upon it may therefore be offered:
That the early tradition existed in fragmentary form is
not true without qualification. Even in Mark there are
signs that stories had already been grouped before they
reached him (cf. 5 22 , where the story of the woman with
the issue of blood is dovetailed into that of the healing of
Jairus's daughter). Theform-critics themselves admit that
the Passion story must have become a consecutive narrative
at a very early date, perhaps for liturgical use as a Eucha-
ristic lection. Moreover, though the chronological scheme
in Mark is very vague, and harmonies of the Gospels are
quite out of date, yet even in Mark there is in the story
of the Ministry a sense of movement and outline which
makes it seem more than a formless agglomeration of dis-
connected episodes. While that Gospel cannot be con-
sidered a systematic biographical account, while its dating
and placing of various stories is unquestionably indefinite,
there is a real spinal column in the narrative which forbids
us to believe that the tradition which it embodies was
wholly disjointed when it reached the evangelist. Burkitt
(loc. cit.) insists that Mark e does not sound like the un-
conscious secretion of a community of believers. Nothing
but a strong element of personal reminiscence could have
produced it.'
Again, though it is probably quite true that hi the early
Church there was no interest in scientific biography, yet
it is difficult to believe that there was no personal interest
62 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
as to Our Lord's life. Were the Christians exempt from
curiosity about One whom they were called on to worship,
and who, it was averred, had lived on earth only a few
years ago? The form-critics classify some of the Gospel
stories as 'legends', designed to satisfy pious curiosity.
Can any one say that this curiosity had not begun to work
even in the earliest Church? And, in trying to satisfy it,
is it reasonable or even sensible to suppose that there was
no conscience at work demanding that due regard should
be paid to truth? It is at any rate quite clear in S. Paul's
Epistles that the Church drew a definite distinction be-
tween what were 'words of the Lord' and what were not
(cf. i Cor. 7). Moreover, is there not much in Our Lord's
teaching which authenticates itself? Bultmann says that
'the community creates myths'. But does community-
creation produce sayings like Jesus'? (cf. Easton, Gospel
before the Gospels^ p. 116). Finally, we must remember
that the Apostolic Church was not working in a void with
no actual memories to guide it. There were eyewitnesses
who cannot have been ready to father or endorse any
fiction to please piety. S. Luke certainly attached impor-
tance to the record of 'eyewitnesses and ministers of the
word'; and yet, as Taylor says, 'if the form-critics are
right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven
immediately after the Resurrection'. For we are asked to
believe that there was nobody in the earliest Church who
had any such personal interest in the incidents of their
Master's earthly life as would be likely to exercise some
determinative influence over the formation of tradition
about Him. If 'the community creates myths', there is no
more incredible myth than that which has been created
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 63
by some of the form-critical community, the myth of a
cult-hero called Jesus, about whom the Christians were
prepared to invent anything and believe anything which
suited their purpose; an empty vessel, into which the
Church poured its own thoughts. After all, the teaching
and person of Jesus, as given to us in the Gospels, are
neither so commonplace nor so easy to follow as to seem
the kind of thing which a body of imperfect men would
be likely not only to imagine, but to set up as an imaginary
authority for themselves to obey. If they were inventing,
they would invent some standard or example which they
could feel more self-assurance in aiming to reach. Men
do not naturally invent for themselves the kind of Master
to whom they can only say 'Depart from me for I am a
sinful man, O Lord.'
Furthermore, although the dogmatic purpose in the
Gospels is undeniable, it seems to have affected the shape
of the stories less than one might a priori have expected.
It is significant that the miracle stories in the Gospels
are definitely not used to prove Jesus' Messiahship. There
are also features in the stories which play no figure in the
later Church; a striking example is the title 'the Son of
Man', which is so frequent in the Gospels, and then seems
to vanish from Church use (Acts y 56 is the only passage
outside the Gospels in which it occurs in the New Testa-
ment). It is a familiar fact that the account of Our Lord's
Baptism in Mark has often been taken to suggest an
Adoptionist view of His relation to God (that He was
adopted as Son by God at the Baptism), which was cer-
tainly not the current view of Pauline teaching or of the
Church of Rome at the time when the Gospel was written.
64 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
The new trend of criticism is certainly interesting, and
has some light to give us. Its defect is that it offers too
large a field for mere subjective impressionism; it over-
emphasizes internal as against external evidence; and it
has to be kept strictly in order by recollecting that we
cannot treat our actual data as if they did not matter. The
work of classification in which these critics plunge is
strongly hypothetical; and it is unscholarly to treat even
suggestive guesswork as if it were convincing truth. But
form-criticism has this merit, that it raises the question
of the formative period, it invites us to speculate as to
the conditions in the early Church under which tradition
took shape, and it forces us to study the tradition in rela-
tion to the life of the primitive Church. One may doubt
whether, when it has gone to its farthest limit, it will be
found to have done more than supply a useful reminder of
the fact that the Gospel narrative took shape as the
tradition of a living and working Church. 1
But, meanwhile, we may beware of allowing it to produce
yet another undue simplification. The influences mould-
ing the tradition may well have been much more complex
than the mere needs of preachers. Lightfoot's conclusion
as to the vagueness of the synoptic portrait of Our Lord
is far more pessimistic than the facts justify or the form-
critical theory necessitates. In the long run we are forced
to remember that the earliest Church was a society of
men who were embracing a new and an unfashionable
belief, who were ready to face many sorts of dangers and
difficulties for its sake; they were not likely to do so for a
1 Though some students seem to find in form- criticism a complete
congruity with a Catholic philosophy of religion.
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 65
mere pious fiction; and they possessed among thek
members people who had been eyewitnesses of their
Master's life. The essential feature of the Christian
Gospel was that at a particular dated moment in recent
history, God in person had appeared in human flesh, and
had said, done, and suffered things in the eyes of the world
which were treated as revealing the Nature, Will, and
Character of God in a way that no previous saint or
prophet had been able to do. The historic act of God was
the basis of the Christian religion. It is simply incredible
that the Christians, knowing what their acceptance might
involve for them, should have been entirely indifferent as
to the evidence that such an act had really taken place,
and that the tradition of the Life and Teaching of Jesus
a life so far above human imitation, and a teaching so
incalculably difficult to obey was a tradition which was
solidly grounded in the recollection of those who had
companied with Him from the time of John's Baptism
until the day when He was taken up.
This much, however, of solid help is given by form-
criticism to those who are concerned to establish the
authority of the Gospel record, that it throws farther back
the date for the rise of the stories which show the reputa-
tion of Jesus of Nazareth among his contemporaries.
Thus Dibelius holds that weighty elements in the tradi-
tion were fixed between A.D. 50 and 70, and since he
argues (herein showing a sane restraint and sense of
responsibility which not all other form-critics exhibit)
that the tradition about Jesus was conservative, the forma-
tion of these traditions is moved back into the twenty
years immediately following Pentecost. We should hear
K
66 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
no more about the Gospel story being a pious fiction of
the late first or early second century. Moreover, form-
criticism makes the Church's witness to the Gospel more
primitive and fundamental than ever. A Christological
view is. implicit in the earliest stories and sayings. We
had always known that the Gospels were written for the
Church by members of the Church. But it had seemed
important to make sure that the actual evangelists were in
a position to obtain good testimony; and so the question
of the actual authorship of the several Gospels had been
regarded as of very great moment. But we are now asked
to realize that the Gospels were in a sense also written
by the Church, inasmuch as the Christian Society is the
corporate sponsor of the traditions which they contain.
This greatly strengthens the line of evidence by carrying
it back not to this or that evangelist, but to the living
voice of the Christian communities in the earliest forma-
tive period.
'The tradition contained in the Gospels may be regarded as
relatively good, not because it is connected with Peter or any
other Apostle, but because of its still vital connection with the
mission. That tradition is evidently not yet literary, not yet
intent on competition with writings and writers of the world.
This unworldly character supplies the best guarantee for the
originality of the tradition.' 1
It becomes therefore a matter of secondary importance
who were the actual writers of the Gospels or what access
they were likely to have to authoritative sources (real or
written) of information, in comparison with the question
whether the Gospels proceed from centres which were of
1 Dibelius, Gospel-criticism and Christology, p. 83.
THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM 67
such importance in the life of early Christendom that the
tradition which they preserved was likely to be more than
purely local, was likely to have been fed by tributaries and
to have been exposed to correction from many quarters.
On this point the credit of our Gospels could hardly stand
higher than it does. Mark is generally agreed to have
proceeded from the Church of Rome and John from the
Church of Ephesus. Luke is supposed to represent mainly
the tradition of the Church of Antioch, and Matthew that
either of the Palestinian Church or of that great area of
civilization which lay in north-eastern Syria stretching to
and round places like Edessa, where in early Christian
days there was a rich culture and a flourishing Church.
Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, Syria one could hardly find a
more important quartet of centres from which to gather
the body of Christian tradition. From each comes a
particular interpretation of Jesus. In regard to this inter-
pretation each Gospel is to be treated as an organic whole.
It gives an aspect of the one Jesus; and we can best make
the picture of Christ, not by abstracting from the Gospels
the greatest common measure of agreed portraiture that
we can justify, but by putting together the four classical
aspects in order to make up the one comprehensive
Figure. This in fact is what Christian devotion has done.
NOTE
Some notice should be taken of a set of the Prologues to the
Gospels which appears in several manuscripts of the Latin
Vulgate. It seems to be the general opinion of scholars that
Dom Donatien de Bruyne has made out his argument that
these were written in the second century and were intended as
68 THE NEW ADVENTURE IN CRITICISM
a polemic against the heretic Marcion. In that case, apart
from the quotation from Papias, which has already been
noticed, they are our earliest direct evidence as to the author-
ship of the Gospels. Such information as they give us which
is relevant to our subject is as follows :
Matthew was written in Judea, Mark in the parts of Italy,
Luke in Achaia, after Matthew and Mark had appeared. The
text of the Prologue to John is corrupt, but it seems to refer to
more than one person called John. In the Lukan Prologue
John the Apostle is associated with the Fourth Gospel. So
far, then, as these Prologues may be depended on (and we
cannot be certain of their authority) they mostly confirm the
suggestions made above. The 'parts of Italy* might easily
include Rome as the place of Mark's origin. That Luke was
written in Achaia is an interesting statement, if true (Streeter
holds that both Luke and Acts were written there); we can
well believe that Luke spent his latter years in Greece; but we
need not therefore doubt that the tradition which he preserved
was that which belonged to the Church of Antioch. The
reference to John, if we read it correctly, makes the statement
that there was at least a definite connexion between the Gospel
and John the Apostle. We need not take too literally the
definition of this connexion as 'dictation'. 'John the Elder'
seems to have been a presbyter of the Church of Ephesus in
the generation when John the Apostle would have been an
old man.
VI
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
Is Criticism Worth While?
TT was saictat the outset that this book is intended for
A Christians who are not specialists in Biblical study. One
can imagine such a person who has read this book so far
saying, 'Well, what has all the bother been about? So far
as I can see, the total result of it all is that we come back
to the point from which we set out. Was it worth while
to disturb us so much on such slight grounds? And can
we feel that all this learned criticism has been anything
but a beating of the air? It seems as if, at the end of it
all, we can use the Gospels with the same sort of security
as we felt before all this criticism began. Why trouble us
to know anything about what has been such an ado about
nothing?'
This comment is both true and false. It is true so far
that we can use the Gospels with a security that, in regard
to all major matters, is comparatively unimpaired. It is
true that Biblical fundamentalism is gone; we can never
' again treat the Bible in the naive way of our forefathers,
as the infallible book from cover to cover, which is
always to be taken in its exactly literal sense. But if
criticism has destroyed this convenient but demoralizing
standpoint, it has not tampered with the tradition of the
Catholic Church. That in fact stands firmer than ever as
the historic interpretation of the life that was lived in
Palestine over 1,900 years ago. Whatever objections can
be raised to that interpretation proceed not from critical
70 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
scholarship^ but from the rationalist presuppositions which
some critical scholars illegitimately used but which in
themselves belong to a totally different field of thought
and knowledge. The Church's tradition is one which
Biblical scholarship cannot bar out, and that the basis of
this tradition lies in the Bible is something which scholar-
ship cannot reasonably deny.
But the comment is none the less false, for two main
reasons:
Firstly, however much we may disagree with it. Rational-
ism has come, has had and still has its influence, and has
to be met. It makes its voice to be heard at every street-
corner, in every bar-parlour or club, in many a school and
many a house. The simple Christian who knows nothing
about the existence of such questionings must be very
rarely found. Many such a one may be conscious of
malaise on the subject. He knows that he ought to be
able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, but he
doubts if he can give any reason that will convince an
unprejudiced listener or silence a gainsayer. He has heard
it said that criticism has exposed the Bible; and he does
not know enough to know how far this is true or false, or
even what seeming truth it may superficially possess. His
only remedy is not to express impatience with the whole
business, but to set himself to learn at least as much
about it as will enable him to speak with some confidence
in dealing with the adversary. It is worth while for him
to discover that, quite apart from any Christian presup-
position of belief, the Rationalist can be met squarely on
his own ground. So far as the Rationalist depends upon
what he calls the 'results' of Gospel criticism, this book is
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 71
intended to help the simple Christian to meet him. It
may seem to have brought us out at the door at which we
went in, but there is some gain in the fact that we come
out with rather more of knowledge and confidence based
on knowledge than we possessed at our entry.
Secondly, it is quite idle to expect that literary and
historical science will agree to consider itself estopped
from applying to the Biblical literature the same sort of
study as it applies to all books. From the scholar's point
of view the Bible is a collection of old books with the
added advantage that they are extraordinarily interesting,
difficult, and important. The fact that they are the
authoritative documents of the Christian religion does not
make him any the less eager to study them as literature.
It would be as futile as it is cowardly for us Christians to
claim that they should be exempted from such examina-
tion. And if scholars are to examine them they must
examine them with entire freedom as to the results which
they may reach. It is for us to appraise their results when
they have reached them; we must regard no scholar as
infallible, and no result of his as assured, until we can
feel that it has received full investigation from all quarters
and yet stands firm. But the autonomy of scholarship is
something which in the interests of truth is as vital as the
autonomy of the soul is in the interests of personal free-
dom. It may have been observed that in this book we
have been concerned entirely with the critical researches
of British and German scholars, and that no mention has
been made of the contribution of Roman Catholic scholars,
such as the great school of French Dominican learning,
to the exposition of the Gospels. But the reason is simple.
72 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
The work of the Dominican scholars m. such exposition,
such for instance as the commentaries of Pere Lagrange,
is of quite first-rate quality, and lays all students under a
debt. But in regard to critical questions, with which we
have been principally concerned, the freedom of Roman
Catholic scholarship is curtailed by the decisions of the
Papal Biblical Commission, which has put forward certain
conclusions on these questions; and the assent of all
Roman Catholics to these conclusions is required as a
matter of duty. The reasons for this action by the authori-
ties of the Roman Catholic Church are their own concern;
it was part of that Church's attempt to stem the advance
of Modernism, and it is not for an outsider to judge
whether the action was well or ill advised. But the result
of it in the field of critical scholarship is beyond question.
As has been said, 'If the conclusion is prescribed, the
study is precluded'. The Papal Commission has chosen
to call a halt in the process of critical investigation and
to impose limitations upon the freedom of scholarship.
It is therefore natural that those who do not accept these
limitations should feel that the dealings of Roman Catholic
scholarship with this particular set of problems are not
such as can be regarded as the free pursuit of the argu-
ment, wherever it may take us. The value of the Roman
Catholic contribution to Synoptic study lies in other
directions and along other lines than those with which
we have been occupied.
Is Criticism Sound?
The next type of difficulty which may be considered is
that which arises from the non-specialist's doubts as to the
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 73
critical methods themselves. Thus it is argued that
criticism has often changed or modified its hypotheses,
and that it may do so again. 'Why then should we pay
any attention to its present set of conclusions, since in
another twenty-five years they may have been given up
or altered?' The answer to this is that Biblical science,
like every other form of science, is continually progressing,
and progress may mean alteration; but that does not ex-
cuse us from the necessity of knowing something about
the present position of scientific hypotheses, or of using
its present conclusions, if only as the starting-point for
their supersession by something better. We do not refuse
to pay respect to the present conclusions of, let us say,
biological or medical science, because we know that they
are profoundly different from those of thirty years ago
and may have been greatly modified before another
generation has passed. We need always to remember that
in most sciences except mathematics all general conclu-
sions are only provisional and hypothetical; but we can
but use them at present as the best that we possess.
Moreover, though scientific theories may be in time re-
jected or revised, there is usually a residuum which re-
mains fast; and the work by which these theories have
been reached is never wasted effort if it has been sincerely
and competently done. The studies of the various schools
of Gospel criticism have not been futile, even if we refuse
to accept, or to accept in any but a very qualified form,
their main hypotheses. For they have certainly helped
students to understand better the nature of the Gospels
and the history of the Church in the apostolic age than
they did before these studies began.
L
74 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
'But', it is retorted, 'are these critical methods worth
trusting? Are they not merely the application of subjective
tests according to the whim or fancy or prejudice of each
individual scholar or group of scholars?' To meet this
question adequately is difficult without going into a
multiplicity of details to show the principles on which
criticism works and how it applies them. But this much
may be worth saying in general: we are not considering
the works of two or three irresponsible men who might
all be liable to subjective considerations. Gospel-criticism
has been the favourite preoccupation of a veritable host of
great scholars all over the world, who have been at work
on its problems with a passionate intensity. It is impos-
sible to hold that there has been no common scientific
conscience at work amongst them which would correct
the tendency to mere casual subjectivism.
Moreover, in studying their writings we can see for
ourselves that they have really scientific tests of all sorts
to apply in reaching their conclusions, and that they work
not by mere subjective guessing but by the use of recog-
nized canons of scholarship. For example, we will cite
the critical determination of the priority of Mark to Mat-
thew. The mere outsider may be tempted to say that Mark
is shorter than Matthew, and that it is more likely for
a man to give a precis of a narrative which he is reproduc-
ing than to enlarge it. This argument has been thoroughly
tested, and it has been made clear (i) that where Matthew
and Mark tell the same story, Mark is often the more full
and nearly always the more vivid. (2) Mark breathes the
atmosphere of a more primitive Church situation than
Matthew. The latter is the Gospel of a systematized
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 75
society, the former shows a far more rudimentary type
of social structure. (3) By an endless set of delicate
comparisons of language it can be put beyond doubt that
the form of narratives in Mark is earlier than the forms of
the same narratives in Matthew and Luke. By comparing
the general methods of each author in dealing with his
material, we can usually find the reasons for the differences
in Matthew and Luke if these are derived from Mark.
If the dependency is reversed, the reasons are impossible
to discover. Such judgements are not the ipse dixit of one
or two scholars, but are the result of an interminable set
of co-operations, criticisms, and cross-correspondences
from a whole world of scholars; their result may be confi-
dently accepted by non-specialist students, for the work
is essentially that of pure scientific scholarship.
Or let us Summarize the reasons why the last section
of Mark (Mk. i6 9 ~ 20 ) is universally agreed to be an addi-
tion by a later hand to the original Gospel : (i) the narrative
takes a fresh start from verse 9, as if what preceded had
not been there, and Mary Magdalene is mentioned as
if for the first time. (2) The verses read like an epitome
and not like a living record, and the incidents cited seem
to presuppose the stories of the other Gospels. (3) The
style and phraseology are very different from that in the
rest of the Gospel. (4) The verses do not occur in the
two great manuscripts Aleph and B, nor in the Sinaitic
Syriac version, nor in three of the oldest manuscripts of
the Armenian version. Eusebius and Jerome note their
absence from the best Greek manuscripts of their time.
In four Greek uncials they are preceded by a shorter end-
ing, to which they are an alternative. In an Armenian
L2
76 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
manuscript of A.D. 986 the verses occur with a note 'of
the presbyter Ariston'; the note may be quite valueless,
but it shows that doubt existed as to the authenticity of
these verses. Even a non-specialist can realize that the
tests applied are perfectly scientific and have no element
of merely subjective fancy in them.
We have already drawn attention to the inability of all
men to rid themselves entirely of all presuppositions. A
fundamentalist is bound to think all higher criticism to
be wicked or at least wrongheaded. A Rationalist and
a Christian are bound to start respectively with a bias
against or for explanations which do not reject the possi-
bility of the supernatural. We ought all to allow for the
presence of such bias, in ourselves and in others. But in
the long run we may believe that Truth is bound to pre-
vail. At any rate, if scholarship goes wrong, it can only
be put right by more scholarship, not by abjuring scholarly
method altogether. If we wish to refute or correct the
conclusions of scholars, we shall do so only by becoming
better scholars.
Criticism and the Preacher
One special difficulty arises from considering the posi-
tion in which criticism may seem to place a faithful
Christian with regard to his use of the recorded teaching
of Our Lord as Christ's ipsissima verba. The Church
gives us the great Christian picture of Our Lord, based
on the great tradition of the Catholic Church. 1 Of this
1 Certain elements in the Gospel records, e.g. the apocalyptic,
eschatological, and demonological beliefs, may be regarded as due to
the mental climate of the primitive Church. But these are incidental
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 7?
tradition the Gospels are the authoritative documents, the
pikces justificative*. And yet we find criticism suggesting
that certain sayings attributed to Him cannot be regarded
as His authentic words, and certain doings of His cannot
be regarded as historical. For example, criticism has said
that the Doom-chapter in Mark (Mk. 13) is not from, or
not all from, Our Lord, or that the controversy with the
Jews (e.g. in John 8) shows signs of the influence of the
later dispute between the Church and the Synagogue.
*How then', it is asked, 'can we quote any words of the
Gospels with confidence as His if doubt is cast upon
some of them?*
This is undoubtedly a real practical difficulty, and it
admits of no easy solution. Indeed, in the long run there
is no solution except to say that those who speak and
teach authoritatively about the Gospels must qualify
themselves to do so by becoming scholars enough to
know how to use good commentaries, or at least by con-
sulting a good commentary if they are to make such a use
of phrases in the Gospels as reasonable knowledge may
justify. And if this seems rather a severe prescription,
one may plead that the possession of sound learning and
the prosecution of diligent study of the Scriptures is part
of the duty of our priests, and that an immense amount
of harm has been done by the ignorant use of the Bible
by both clergy and laity. If criticism drives us to study
the Bible more than we do, it will have atoned for all its
shortcomings.
But we can add that, even apart from any critical
and unessential to the picture of Our Lord as given in the Church's
Creeds.
78 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
treatment, the Bible is already full enough of hard texts,
which we should be well advised not to use without having
first studied their meaning in a good exposition. What,
for instance, might some men make of the texts about the
sin against the Holy Ghost, about hating your father and
mother, or the word of forgiveness to the harlot 'because
she loved much', or 'the first born of all creation* as applied
to Christ (a text which was used as an Arian slogan), if
they had not taken some pains to learn what scholarly
exposition could teach them about their significance?
Criticism only gives us a new reason for caution; it does
not introduce a new necessity for being students.
We may remember, too, that the great Catholic tradition
of Christ is the safeguard against fads, heresies, and dis-
proportions. It does not lie within its province to foreclose
any critical questions. But the Church's interpretation
of Christ's Person is something which comes to us on the
continuous authority of the Church, and the literary basis
of it is found in the New Testament from S. Paul's
Epistles (which after all are the earliest documents in the
New Testament) onwards. If we hold fast to that, such
questions as are raised on points of detail by criticism
need not trouble us much. The Catholic can afford to be
critical, for he has in the Church's tradition about Christ
that which will safeguard him from the outre and the
irresponsible in his arguments or conclusions.
For, after all, the difficulties presented by criticism in
this respect are not really of large scale. The immense
bulk of the tradition may be securely used both as to the
sayings and the doings. Thus, the historical evidence of
the Virgin Birth may by itself be weak; we could hardly
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 79
expect it to be otherwise, though it is stronger than is
always allowed; but, regarded as a part of the Church's
tradition, it borrows force from the strength of that tradi-
tion; and a Christian believer will be very unready to
doubt it. The evidence for the Empty Tomb is on the
contrary so strong that scepticism is driven to desperate
shifts in order to impugn it; and its attempts to explain
it away always break down from the weight of their own
improbability. It is not too much to say that but for the
prejudice against miracles, very little doubt on grounds of
scholarship alone would ever have been raised about it.
As to the teaching in the Gospels, if it does not always
reproduce Our Lord's exact words, it reproduces the gist
of what He said. We may have our private opinions as to
the authenticity of this or that text or passage. We may
suspect here and there the presence of misunderstanding
or mistaken recollection. But the scope of such reasonable
doubt must be, to any believer, very small; and, as has
been said, the great Catholic tradition, if he holds it firm,
will save him from either magnifying his private doubts
or from serious error in entertaining them.
Criticism and Truth
At this point one finds the argument from 'the thin
end of the wedge' raise its head. 'If one may doubt this
verse or that verse, why should one not doubt all?' This
contention used to be urged against Old Testament criti-
cism. If the six days of Genesis i are called in question,
may one not be led on to doubt the truth of the Nativity
or of the Resurrection? It now makes itself heard within
the New Testament. To it there are two main answers:
8o SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
Firstly, we must follow the truth, wheresoever it leads
us, at all costs. In regard to these matters the question
to ask is not. How far may it go, but, Is it true? It can
never be right to refuse to accept a truth because it is
inconvenient and makes things difficult.
Secondly, there is, we may say, almost nothing in the
Gospel record which has not been doubted by some
scholar or other. But we are under no obligation to
accept all doubts because we may accept some. The same
critical methods which called the historicity of Genesis i
into question are those which mutatis mutandis have been
applied in the criticism of the Gospels. But the founda-
tions have not been cast down. Criticism has had its
oscillations, but its general tendency has always been to
revert towards Belief and thereby to strengthen intelligent
Faith. It is an enormous reassurance to feel that we have
now better reasons for believing in the authority of the
Gospels than we had before criticism began its work;
and the process has been one which has thrown a flood
of light upon their obscurities and difficulties. The Church
can still with confidence present to its faithful members
the picture of Jesus Christ the Son of God 3 Perfect God
and Perfect Man, as drawn for us in the Creed, and can
still point to the Bible as its justification of such an inter-
pretation, to the Old Testament as the book of preparation
and to the New as the book of the fulfilment. In the
Gospels and the other New Testament books there is all
the material needed to judge whether this interpretation
is congruous or not with the Life which He led on earth.
Most of His teaching authenticates itself immediately as
such as God in man would give. If in certain passages
SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH 81
this authentication may be more dubious to read, the
process of criticism makes it possible for us to say that
such passages are few.
The one thing which we must not do is to allow a right-
ful veneration for the Catholic tradition to reintroduce
into the Church of England the old fundamentalist view
of inspiration. For, apart from the fact that such a view
cannot hold water, it offers to man an infallible guide,
and a book as such a guide; and this is mischievous to
faith. In regard to the Old Testament the problem is
settled. Nobody can fail to discern that there are degrees
of inspiration within that book. Nobody, for instance,
can place Nahum on such a high spiritual level as Second
Isaiah, or I Kings 22 on an equality with Hosea. God has
ceaselessly been trying to reveal Himself to man. But He
had only human channels to use, and those channels
could only be in varying degrees imperfect organs. The
gramophonic theory of divine inspiration is dead.
Similar considerations apply to the New Testament.
The Perfect Life was lived. Men companied with the
Lord, recalled His teaching, and wrote the record of it.
In everything of really primary and essential importance
we may believe that the indefectible grace of the Holy
Spirit would preserve the Church from serious error.
But the Spirit in the Church, like the Spirit in the Bible,
found no infallible channels through which to work. The
disciples themselves confess that they could not under-
stand the Lord when He was with them; it is not hard to
believe that they could not understand Him perfectly
thereafter. There was, because they were imperfect men,
room for misunderstanding and misrepresentation of their
82 SCHOLARSHIP AND FAITH
Master. It is the work of scholars, commentators, and
expositors to decipher where such traces of mistakes or
imperfect understanding are to be found. In doing so
they have hammered out certain canons of judgement.
No doubt the subjective element has played some part
in their use of these canons, but this element can receive
curb, check, or justification from the work both of scholar-
ship and of Faith. Scholarship is doing its part in this
process. Faith must also do its part. It is the business
of Faith to insist that true scholarship will not by presup-
positions and prejudices bar itself from receiving correc-
tion. And the outcome of it all is a rational Faith, which
is the only adequate riposte to Rationalism. For essentially
Faith and Reason cannot be in opposition to one another.
The Scholastics were convinced that this was so, and in a
recent book on The Pain of the World and the Providence
of God Father d' Arcy places in the mouth of a Priest the
great saying 'the appeal to religion as a substitute for
reasoning is to me an insult to God*. Criticism is but a
special subdepartment of the process of reasoning. We
may feel that it has vindicated its value, and that the
contribution of Christian scholars to it has been not the
least of the influences in procuring that vindication. Cer-
tainly Christian scholarship could not leave this field of
work untouched; and Christian believers need have no
fear of its result.
Magna est veritas et praevalebit.
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